Title: Adaptive vision-based system for landing an autonomous hexacopter drone on a specific landing platform

Authors: Abdel Ilah Nour Alshbatat

Addresses: Department of Communications, Electronics and Computer Engineering, Tafila Technical University, Tafila, 66110, Jordan

Abstract: Today, autonomous flight and precise landing of drones are crucial for many applications such as object detection, and delivery of services. The focus of this research is to present an adaptive vision-based system for landing an autonomous hexacopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on a specific landing platform. The system is based on a colour-based algorithm to position a visual marker and then land the drone in environments where GPS signal is weak or unavailable. Four cameras and one marker are used in the suggested approach. The attitude and altitude of the drone are adjusted automatically based on the information obtained from the vision system. To verify the performance of the proposed system, a practical test bench was developed. Simulation studies and real experiments were conducted under different scenarios. The results show that the proposed system is highly reliable and robust in detecting the landing area and landing the drone.

Keywords: hexacopter; unmanned aerial vehicle; UAV; autonomous landing; vision-based system; colour-based object detection.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISTA.2021.120525

International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications, 2021 Vol.20 No.3, pp.245 - 270

Accepted: 14 Sep 2021
Published online: 24 Jan 2022 *

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