Vision Assisted Autonomous Landing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.

In this paper, a strategy for an autonomous landing maneuver for an underactuated, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) using position information obtained from a single monocular on-board camera is presented. Although the UAV is underactuated in translational control inputs (i.e., a lift force can only be produced), the proposed controller is shown to achieve globally uniform ultimate boundedness (GUUB) in position regulation error during the landing approach. The proposed vision-based control algorithm is built upon homography-based techniques and Lyapunov design methods.