Full Mission Simulation of a Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Landing in a Non-Cooperative Environment

摘要

This paper describes the development and testing of an integrated simulation environment for the autonomous landing of a rotorcraft unmanned aerial vehicle at non-cooperative sites without the aid of GPS. The simulation includes a graphical display element that provides sensor modeling capabilities, a ground station user interface for mission setup and runtime, a vehicle dynamics model and control laws for a Yamaha RMAX, and a mission manager that provides autonomy functions and ties all of these elements together. The mission manager implements a landing procedure that incorporates stereo ranging and safe landing area determination algorithms to identify a suitable obstacle-free landing point, and monocular feature tracking with position estimation algorithms for navigation to the landing point without GPS. Results are reported from a performance evaluation of the individual machine vision algorithms using the simulation, and these results are compared with requirements for autonomous landing flight trials.