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Apparatus and Method for Autonomous Landing of an Aerial Vehicle
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UAVs are currently being used for reconnaissance, particularly in military operations, and some private companies are experimenting with UAV technology to deliver packages. Further, decreasing costs of UAVs and related equipment has resulted in the growth of UAV hobbyists.
Currently, UAVs may be remotely piloted by human pilots who may be located in the general vicinity of the aerial vehicle, or halfway around the world. UAVs may also be controlled automatically, such as through autopilot systems. Alternatively, UAVs may be controlled in part by a pilot and partly through automation. One aspect of autonomous flight that requires improvement is autonomous landing. As used herein, autonomous landing refers to the process of an UAV returning to the ground without human control. Autonomous landing does not require human interaction with the UAV at any point during the process, either during or after landing of the UAV. The ability to land a UAV in a target landing location is important because it obviates the need for an operator or owner to retrieve the UAV from a general landing location and relocate the UAV to a different location for storage, charging, or refueling. Such a task may be inconsequential for a hobbyist, but companies that may operate a fleet of thousands of UAVs would find it impractical to require human intervention to retrieve UAVs.
One currently used method for autonomously landing UAVs involves GPS technology. Landing coordinates are provided to the UAV, and onboard GPS systems identify the landing location. However, GPS technology is imprecise and can only be used to identify a general landing location, which may be a couple square feet in area. Thus, GPS technology cannot be used for precisely landing a UAV at a target landing spot. Another type of currently used autonomous landing system implements infrared detectors that can be used to identify a precise landing location; however, IR detectors cannot always provide the accuracy and precision for autonomous landing of an aerial vehicle. With infrared detectors, obstacles such as sunlight and light reflections cause inaccuracies in the calculation of a flight path for the aerial vehicle. Furthermore, these detectors are linked to high energy consumption and prevents an efficient and power-saving solution for autonomous landing. Another system and method of autonomous landing uses photo processors; however, these photo processors require additional equipment in the form of at least one camera. The added equipment reduces payload capacity and overall flight time. In addition, photo processing requires a high level of computational overhead to successfully land a UAV, which results in high energy consumption.
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