On the Closed-Loop Feature-Based UAS Landing on a Moving Platform

A new motion platform facility was developed at the University of Maryland to study autonomous landing of vertical lift aircraft on moving ship decks. It includes a 6-by-6-ft platform of 1.5 ton payload, a Vicon system, and a quadrotor. The platform can generate high-frequency / high-amplitude stochastic motions in all six degrees of freedom, including simpler motions typical of DDG-51 class vessels at high seas. The quadrotor is custom-built in-house around a feature-based vision system for detection, tracking, and pose estimation of a moving deck. In this paper, the vision data is coupled with the flight controls to execute autonomous landings. The paper presents a preliminary assessment of the platform, the quadrotor, and the performance of the closed-loop algorithm using simple tracking and landing experiments.