Integrated Air-Ground Vehicles for UAV Emergency Landing Based on Graph Convolution Network

With unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies advanced rapidly, many applications have emerged in cities. However, those applications do not widely spread as the safety consideration hinders the UAV from integrating into the civilian environment. This work focuses on investigating the UAV emergency landing problem which is a critical safety functionality of UAV. This work proposed a graph convolution network (GCN)-based decision network to learn by imitating the human pilots’ landing strategy. To alleviate the needs of a large amount of real-world data for model training, the proposed model allows to be trained in a simulated environment and then transferred to the real-world scenario due to the separation of domain-specific terrain classes and domain-independent topological structures among down-looking camera images. The GCN-based decision network can be coupled with a topological heuristic to improve the performance of action prediction in an emergency situation. To evaluate the proposed method, this work implemented a simulation environment for collecting data and testing the UAV emergency landing. The empirical results in both simulated and real-world scenarios show that the proposed methods can outperform the state-of-the-art counterparts in terms of predictive accuracy and success landing rate.