On Autonomous Landing of AR.Drone: Hands-On Experience

Autonomous landing is one of the must-have operations of unmanned aerial vehicles such as drones. In this paper we describe an approach for fully autonomous landing of AR.Drones. This approach consists of two components – identifying and recognizing a proper pattern used to mark the landing area and reaching the landing area (landing) even if small disturbances occur. We discuss possible patterns to identify the landing area, justify why we selected two coloured circles as the landing pattern, and describe an algorithm to recognize this pattern. In the second part we explain the PID controller used to control the drone during landing. The presented techniques were implemented and are available as an extension of Control Tower – software for controlling AR.Drone from a computer.