Autonomous Landing of a Multirotor Aircraft on a Docking Station

A multirotor aircraft was developed to help test if an aircraft could land autonomously on a docking station. A docking station was designed to allow for the autonomous charging of an aircraft. The docking station makes use of a XY-Positioning table to accurately position an aircraft on the landing platform once an aircraft has successfully landed. A contact charging method was developed to allow for a charge connection between the aircraft and the docking station, once the aircraft had been correctly positioned. An ArUco marker was used in order to help the aircraft detect and accurately land on the docking station. The aircraft contained an onboard computer running ROS (including MAVROS) to control the Pixhawk flight controller, which was running PX4 open source firmware. A simulation of the landing system was successfully performed in Gazebo.