Vision-based Autonomous Landing of UAV on Moving Platform using a New Marker

Abstract

Abstract The research of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight autonomous landing on a moving platform based on computer vision has important significance, especially for the rescue and spray UAV in the future. A vision-based relative position and attitude estimation algorithm with a novel color marker and its recognition method was proposed for the UAV autonomous landing system. The new marker is designed with a pattern which make it is as visible as possible in the whole landing process. The proposed relative position and attitude estimation algorithm is based on the four corner points on the marker which are detected by the combined approach of vanishing point of parallel lines and Levenberg-Marquardt (L-M) optimization method. Indoor and outdoor experiments were carried out. The results indicate that the method of marker detection has real-time and robust performance and the position and attitude estimation accuracy attain cm-level, which shows the feasibility of landings on moving platform automatically.