Landing Zone Determination for Autonomous Rotorcraft in Surveillance Applications

This paper presents an approach for finding possible landing sites for a rotorcraft from an inertially referenced point-cloud model of the environment. To identify potential landing sites that are suitably flat and level, a grid-based random sample consensus algorithm separates the terrain map into discrete areas for plane-fitting analysis. Landing sites are selected that satisfy constraints on flatness and levelness while optimizing the surveillance target’s visibility. Flight test results are presented from a small multirotor aircraft flying over a scale-model cityscape. Results from real-time landing-site experiments are presented and discussed.

[1]  Pedro Arias,et al.  Metrological evaluation of Microsoft Kinect and Asus Xtion sensors , 2013 .

[2]  Timothy W. McLain,et al.  Performance Evaluation of Vision-Based Navigation and Landing on a Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicle , 2007, 2007 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV '07).

[3]  Sebastian Scherer,et al.  Infrastructure-free shipdeck tracking for autonomous landing , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[4]  Gaurav S. Sukhatme,et al.  Visually guided landing of an unmanned aerial vehicle , 2003, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[5]  Tim,et al.  Full Mission Simulation of a Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Landing in a Non-Cooperative Environment , 2005 .

[6]  S. Shankar Sastry,et al.  Autonomous Vision-based Landing and Terrain Mapping Using an MPC-controlled Unmanned Rotorcraft , 2007, Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[7]  Andreas Zell,et al.  Automatic Take Off, Tracking and Landing of a Miniature UAV on a Moving Carrier Vehicle , 2011, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[8]  Sebastian Scherer,et al.  First results in autonomous landing and obstacle avoidance by a full-scale helicopter , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[9]  Larry H. Matthies,et al.  Vision Guided Landing of an Autonomous Helicopter in Hazardous Terrain , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[10]  Andrew E. Johnson,et al.  Lidar-Based Hazard Avoidance for Safe Landing on Mars , 2002 .

[11]  S. Shankar Sastry,et al.  LANDING AN UNMANNED AIR VEHICLE: VISION BASED MOTION ESTIMATION AND NONLINEAR CONTROL , 1999 .

[12]  Sanjiv Singh,et al.  Self-Aware Helicopters: Full-Scale Automated Landing and Obstacle Avoidance in Unmapped Environments , 2011 .

[13]  Simon Lacroix,et al.  Autonomous Detection of Safe Landing Areas for an UAV from Monocular Images , 2006, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[14]  Mark B. Tischler,et al.  Precision Autonomous Landing Adaptive Control Experiment (PALACE) , 2006 .

[15]  Sebastian Scherer,et al.  Autonomous landing at unprepared sites by a full-scale helicopter , 2012, Robotics Auton. Syst..