Autonomous and Accurate Landing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Sammanfattning: During recent years, advancements in mobile technology have enabled the development of quadcopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to the point where their size and maneuverability enable indoor flight. In such GPS-denied environments, accurate positioning is a challenge which poses difficulties during flight, navigation and landing. Such positioning systems exist, but are often expensive or rely on environment encroachment. This thesis implements a landing procedure with hardware physically limited to a UAV and its landing platform. This is done by implementing an inner position controller utilizing visual odometry for pose estimation, and an outer sequence controller for discrete event handling. The results show ability to control the UAV from within line of sight to a completed landing. When landing on a flat surface, the results show an average positional error of <12 mm and angular error of <1°. In comparison, when landing on the designed landing platform, the results show less accurate control and a resulting 40 % success rate.