Autonomous Landing of a Quadcopter on a Stationary Platform

Abstract

This work proposes an algorithm for the autonomous landing of a quadcopter on a stationary platform in environments with low visibility, including wind intensity and light disturbance factors unpredictable. The quadcopter, equipped with a camera facing the ground and a small computer, detects the given symbol on the platform, predicts a suitable trajectory using a nonlinear motion model, and follows the calculated trajectory. As a result, the quadcopter could touch down the platform at the height of 4 meters, the highest altitude of a quadcopter could achieve to the same type of low configuration designs. In details, the experiments have been done ten times in each case of environmental conditions with two different structured models: the proposed model and the remake reference model. While the reference model shares the moderate figures in terms of landing ability and algorithm speed: 270 centimeters with ten milliseconds respectively, the proposed model leads to accuracy for touching down the base is 90%, as well as staying a stable range of flight time between 16 seconds and 53 seconds. Also, the results show the feasibility of the proposed algorithm when the system remains a high performance 174 FPS, together with around eight milliseconds in the scan cycle time.