Design of air-ground cooperative landing platform and autonomous landing strategy

Abstract

This paper studies innovative design for landing platform design and autonomous landing strategies for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). First, a self-leveling landing platform on a mobile unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) is designed, which can be maintained even when the UGV moves on uneven terrain. Then, with the cooperation of the UAV and the UGV, they are controlled to reach the same velocity in the horizontal direction, which helps avoid the UAV’s rollover caused by horizontal velocity difference. Meanwhile, a buffering strategy is designed to reduce the vertical velocity difference, which helps avoid a hard landing. Finally, a combined landing code is designed to improve the accuracy and success rate of UAV landing. Experiments are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design of a self-leveling platform and autonomous landing strategies.