Visual servoing of an airplane for auto-landing

In this paper, a visual servoing scheme is proposed to control an airplane during its landing. A linearized model of the airplane dynamics and decoupled visual features are used to build the control scheme. A desired trajectory which takes into account the airplane dynamic is designed. Coupling this trajectory and the control law enables the airplane to join its desired path. Then the airplane is controlled to follow the glide path, realize the flare manoeuvre and finally touchdown. Simulation results are obtained with a quite realistic flight simulator which is based on a non linear airplane dynamic model. They show that the airplane is able to land automatically by using visual data.