Design and Preliminary Testing of an Aerial Landing Dock for Mobile Robots for Multi-Modal Robotic Systems

Despite existing literature exploring multi-agent systems such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) - Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) coordinated systems, few have proposed a landing platform design in order to actively carry and transport a UAV between autonomous missions. The implementation of a UGV as an auxiliary facility to the UAV can provide several benefits such as providing UAVs power, communication, and transport after exhausting its mission capability. The work presented in this paper attempts to address this issue by proposing the design of a landing dock that minimizes the amount of active parts needed to secure and position a UAV. Likewise, to aid in the autonomous landing of the UAV on the proposed landing platform, a Finite State Machine is utilized in order to actively monitor and assign tasks to the UAV during the completion of autonomous missions. Preliminary test results are presented.