Adaptive pure pursuit based autonomous landing of quadrotors

Landing of quadrotors is a complex and challenging maneuver. Developing autonomous landing technologies has been an active area of research over the past decade. This paper presents a novel guidance strategy for vision based autonomous landing process for both stationary and moving landing targets. We develop a modified pursuit guidance strategy, wherein we integrate a novel velocity controller with the pure pursuit guidance law to achieve faster and accurate landing. The proposed controller is validated for a stationary and moving landing pad through simulations. Further, we also evaluate the said controller in real time conditions for a stationary landing pad through outdoor hardware experiments. Both simulation and experiment results show that the proposed guidance strategy performs better than traditional vertical landing approaches.