Autonomous Landing System of a VTOL UAV on an Upward Docking Station Using Visual Servoing

In this paper, we proposed a novel autonomous system of unmanned aerial vehicles docking station that consists of electromagnet docking structure, auto-landing, and visual servo control. Comparing with the conventional downward docking system, we develop an upward docking system that could disregard ground effect and improve the utility of limited operating space. The design of visual servo control enables UAVs to maintain stability and perform docking only relying on the detection of the ArUco marker as position feedback. We show the hardware design of the electromagnet docking station and the experiment demonstrates the successful docking process in different flight modes and upward docking.