A visual/inertial integrated landing guidance method for UAV landing on the ship

This paper presents a visual/inertial integrated guidance method for UAV shipboard landing. The airborne vision system is utilized to track infrared cooperated targets on the ship and output their center coordinates in the image. Meanwhile, the attitude information of the UAV is obtained from airborne Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is chosen to fuse the visual and inertial information. The UAV's position, attitude, and velocity relative to the runway and the ship motion information are estimated. The ship motion information is utilized to predict the position of the intended landing point at the touchdown moment through the Autoregressive algorithm. And the motion information of the UAV is used to calculate the deviation from the intended landing path. All the information is delivered to the flight control system to calculate control command. Simulation shows that the visual/inertial integrated landing guidance system achieves satisfied estimation and prediction results.