Real-time autonomous take-off, tracking and landing of UAV on a moving UGV platform

This paper presents a control strategy for take-off, tracking, and landing of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to be applied to missions of forest fires monitoring, detection, and fighting and other applications. A combination of sliding mode control (SMC) and linear quadratic regulator (LQR) is presented as the UAV local controller, while pure-pursuit strategy is applied as the UGV controller. Leader-follower formation controller approach is used during take-off, tracking and landing phases based on SMC. Experimental results are presented in order to demonstrate the performance of the team in different scenarios.