Quaternion-based Robust Quadrotor Landing Control on A Non-cooperative Moving Platform

Autonomous dynamic landing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) on non-cooperative mobile platforms can address the limitations of small UAVs with relatively short battery life and short range. In this paper, a cascade flight control method based on error transformation is proposed to solve the vision-based landing problem of a low-cost quadrotor on a non-cooperative mobile platform. The proposed controller is robust to uncertain and dynamic systems because it does not contain prior knowledge of the moving platform. Firstly, the error transformation method based on performance function is used to process the intermediate signal of backstepping control technology, which simplifies the control design. Secondly, for uncertain target motion states and large tilt-angle flight situations, quaternion-based attitude control is used to avoid singularity. Finally, Python and Gazebo simulation experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.