Landing system for AR.Drone 2.0 using onboard camera and ROS

Abstract

As the application of unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs) becoming more widely, a demand for precise autonomous landing is rising quickly. AR.Drone 2.0 is a high-tech low-cost flying toy that is able to take role as UAV. In this paper, we present a system for the drone to implement autonomous landing. The image flow from the camera of the drone is obtained and rectified by camera calibration. Then the image frames are processed by a marker recognition package to detect the AR marker which is used as a landing pad, and calculate the position and orientation relation between the drone and the landing pad. Next a PID controller is used to control the drone's velocity to stably hovering on the center of the landing pad. A laptop computer running Ubuntu and ROS is used to communicate with the drone via Wi-Fi, throughout the landing process. Several experiments are made to verify the feasibility of the whole system.