Title: Vision-based control for landing an aerial vehicle on a marine vessel

Abstract: This work addresses the landing problem of an aerial vehicle, exemplified by a simple quadrotor, on a moving platform using image-based visual servo control. First, the mathematical model of the quadrotor aircraft is introduced, followed by the design of the inner-loop control. At the second stage, the image features on the textured target plane are exploited to derive a vision-based control law. The image of the spherical centroid of a set of landmarks present in the landing target is used as a position measurement, whereas the translational optical flow is used as velocity measurement. The kinematics of the vision-based system is expressed in terms of the observable features, and the proposed control law guarantees convergence without estimating the unknown distance between the vision system and the target, which is also guaranteed to remain strictly positive, avoiding undesired collisions. The performance of the proposed control law is evaluated in MATLAB and 3-D simulation software Gazebo. Simulation results for a quadrotor UAV are provided for different velocity profiles of the moving target, showcasing the robustness of the proposed controller.