Autonomous Landing of an Unmanned Helicopter based on Vision and Inertial Sensing

In this paper, we propose an autonomous precision landing method for an unmanned helicopter based on an on-board visual navigation system consisting of a single pan-tilting camera, off-the-shelf computer hardware and inertial sensors. Compared to existing methods, the system doesn’t depend on additional sensors (in particular not on GPS), offers a wide envelope of starting points for the autonomous approach, and is robust to different weather conditions. Helicopter position and attitude is estimated from images of a specially designed landing pad. We provide results from both simulations and flight tests, showing the performance of the vision system and the overall quality of the landing.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ISER
• Authors: Torsten Merz, Simone Duranti, Gianpaolo Conte
• Keywords: Autonomous Precision Landing, ISER 2004, On-board Visual Navigation, Robotics, Single Pan-tilting Camera