Cooperative Navigation System of AGV and UAV with Autonomous and Precise Landing

Along with the growing popularity of the unmanned smart factory concept, AGVs and UAVs are beginning to take on a wide variety of complex tasks. Due to the limitations of a single robot’s capabilities, which restrict the application of these robots within factories, the study of heterogeneous UAV-AGV systems has become increasingly important. Given the potential deployment of wireless charging and the use of LiDAR for SLAM, precise landing is a crucial part of this process; however, because of the ground effect and external disturbances, precise landing is a difficulty awaiting resolution. Thus, this paper proposes a system design for the precise landing of a UAV on an AGV. First, we design a customized landing gear for precise landing to reduce the impact of ground effects and external disturbances, which is validated by fluid simulation. Second, we present a marker-based visual servoing system to enable a UAV to accurately land on the precise position of an AGV with a fixed attitude. In the end, preliminary experiments were performed to demonstrate that this work successfully addressed the autonomous, precise landing of UAVs on the landing gear of AGVs. These experiments also demonstrate both the effectiveness and excellence of this approach.