Autonomous Landing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle on an Unmanned Ground Vehicle in a GNSS-denied scenario

Sammanfattning: An autonomous system consisting of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in cooperation with an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) is of interest in applications for military reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition (RSTA). The basic idea of such a system is to take advantage of the vehicles strengths and counteract their weaknesses. The cooperation aspect suggests that the UAV is capable of autonomously landing on the UGV. A fundamental part of the landing is to localise the UAV with respect to the UGV. Traditional navigation systems utilise global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers for localisation. GNSS receivers have many advantages, but they are sensitive to interference and spoofing. Therefore, this thesis investigates the feasibility of autonomous landing in a GNSS-denied scenario. The proposed landing system is divided into a control and an estimation system. The control system uses a proportional navigation (PN) control law to approach the UGV. When sufficiently close, a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller is used to match the movements of the UGV and perform a controlled descent and landing. The estimation system comprises an extended Kalman filter that utilises measurements from a camera, an imu and ultra-wide band (UWB) impulse radios. The landing system is composed of various results from previous research. First, the sensors used by the landing system are evaluated experimentally to get an understanding of their characteristics. The results are then used to determine the optimal sensor placements, in the design of the EKF, as well as, to shape the simulation environment and make it realistic. The simulation environment is used to evaluate the proposed landing system. The combined system is able to land the UAV safely on the moving UGV, confirming a fully-functional landing system. Additionally, the estimation system is evaluated experimentally, with results comparable to those obtained in simulation. The overall results are promising for the possibility of using the landing system with the presented hardware platform to perform a successful landing.