Stabilization System for UAV Landing on Rough Ground by Adaptive 3D Sensing and High-Speed Landing Gear Adjustment

Abstract

This paper proposes a real-time landing gear control system based on adaptive and high-speed 3D sensing to enable the safe landing of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on rough ground. The proposed system controls the measurement area on the ground according to the position and attitude of the UAV and enables high-speed 3D sensing of the focused areas in which the landing gears are expected to contact the ground. Furthermore, the spatio-temporal resolution of the measurement can be improved by focusing a measurement area and the proposed system can recognize the detailed shape of the ground and the dynamics. These detailed measurement results are used to control the lengths of the landing gears at high speed, and it is ensured that all the landing gears contact the ground simultaneously to reduce the instability at touchdown. In the experiment setup, the proposed system realized high-speed sensing for heights of contact points of two landing gears at a rate of 100 Hz and almost simultaneous contact on ground within 36 ms.