Laser-Assisted Guidance Landing Technology for Drones

Inexact drone landings occur because of the global positioning system (GPS) resulting in measurement errors that are frequently several meters. The existing methods that tackle the problem usually use cameras. Their cost is relatively higher than the 0.5mW lasers we used in our work and the performance of vision-based methods in recognition range are only good at close ranges. A new method for increasing accuracy during descent is introduced and described in this paper using laser-guided systems mounted on a landing base for drones that we developed ourselves. Embedded system design was merged with 3D printing technology to implement our solution. The landing error margin of the developed system falls within 30 - 40 centimeters and the maximum tolerance horizontal distance between the drone and the landing base could reach up to 25 meters. Such results indicate that there are important areas to be considered if lasers were used as drone guides. Besides, we also cover future uses of our system at the end of the paper, which can help to understand its significance better.