Autonomous take-off and landing on a colored platform

This paper presents a novel autonomous take-off and landing approach which uses a discrete-time finite-horizon suboptimal nonlinear control strategy to achieve a smooth landing on specific colored platform. By color-based tracking we can improve the performance of the position landing by correcting the position given by the GPS. The signal of the GPS is not always reliable since the accuracy strongly depends on the environment situation and the correction by vision servoing is then necessary. Experimental results using the proposed approach show a better performance than those where the GPS signal is only used to perform the take-off and landing tasks in a completely autonomous way in presence of wind gusts.