Visual Servoed Autonomous Landing on a Surface Vessel

In this paper, we describe a quadrotor able to land autonomously on a moving platform by employing on-board sensors. The full pose of the platform is estimated using a vision system. Furthermore, an ultrasonic sensor is used to compute the relative vertical position and velocity of the platform w.r.t. the quadrotor. This redundant information is used to achieve greater robustness during the final landing phase. The landing algorithm is presented and an overview of the overall architecture is provided. Software-in-the-loop simulations have been performed to evaluate the performance and to analyse in a safe way the entire landing procedure. We have finally tested our landing system in a real world environment using a customized quadrotor. Results of the landing procedure performed with real quadrotor are presented.