Friday, September 20, 2013

Precision-guided landing and takeoff of multirotor/VTOL drones

We've been working on precision guidance of multirotor/vtol drones for fully automatic takeoff and landing scenarios.  Here's a glimpse at a recent simulation of one guidance method.




This is an orthographic projection of the drone-landing platform system viewed from above.  The drone is visible as the black-outline circle with colored dots in the center.  The landing platform is visible as a green colored square with numbered and colored dots at the corners.

The large red and blue rectangles represent a projection angle between the drone and the landing platform.  As the drone descends, the angle shrinks.

In this simulation we randomly position the drone somewhere near the landing platform and then use an algorithm to guide the drone to a precise landing.

The platform in this model is scaled to about 1m sides.