Visual coordinated landing of a UAV on a mobile robot manipulator

In this paper an image-based visual-servoing control law for the coordinated landing of a VToL UAV on an actuated landing platform is proposed. The landing platform is carried by a mobile manipulator composed of a mobile platform and a robotic arm. The UAV is endowed with a downward camera employed for the coordination of the landing manoeuvres. The presence of redundancy in the system at the task level, the intrinsic redundancy of the mobile manipulator, and the under-actuation of the UAV are explicitly addressed into the proposed control law. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is tested though simulations.