A Control Architecture for Time-Optimal Landing of a Quadrotor Onto a Moving Platform

We address the problem of autonomous landing of a quadrotor onto a heaving (moving vertically) platform in this paper. A control architecture that consists of a motion estimation module, a trajectory generation module and a tracking control module is proposed. The motion estimation module estimates the absolute motion of the platform and the quadrotor with the measurements from an on-board accelerometer and vision measurements. Based on these estimates, the trajectory generation module generates a time-optimal reference trajectory. With the reference trajectory and motion estimation, the tracking control module synthesizes a control command that enables robust tracking of the reference trajectory. Experimental results and comparison with a state-of-the-art landing controller demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control architecture.