AN AUTONOMOUS LANDING ON MOVING PLATFORMS USING VISION AND ADAPTIVE CONTROL IN GPS-DENIED ENVIRONMENTS
Abstract
Developing autonomous landing systems for moving targets remains a challenge in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), especially without reliance on global positioning system. This study proposes a vision-based control framework for multirotor UAVs, integrated into a reproducible Gazebo/PX4 simulation environment. The system utilizes a downward-facing monocular camera for relative pose estimation, coupled with an offboard velocity controller. Instead of a static control law, we introduce an adaptive PID scheme featuring gain scheduling and dead-zone handling, designed to maintain stability during the transition from high altitude tracking to precise touchdown. The landing logic is governed by a hierarchical state machine that executes a multi-phase descent, culminating in an open-loop velocity lock to counteract ground-effect disturbances. Performance validation confirms the system’s adaptability, demonstrating reliable landing capabilities on ground vehicles moving at constant velocities up to 2 m/s (7.2 km/h). These results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive control strategy in dynamic, GPS-denied environments.
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