• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.14 no.12
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• pp.1253-1259
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• 2008

This paper presents a landing controller and guidance law for net-recovery of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles. A linear quadratic controller was designed using the system identification result of the unmanned aerial vehicle. A pursuit guidance law is applied to guide the vehicle to a recovery net with imaginary landing points on the desired approach path. The landing performance of a pure pursuit guidance, a constant pseudo pursuit guidance, and a variable pseudo pursuit guidance is compared. Numerical simulation using an unmanned aerial vehicle model was performed to verify the performance of the proposed landing guidance law.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.54-60
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• 2009

In this paper, a precision landing approach is implemented based on real-time image processing. A full-scale landmark for automatic landing is used. canny edge detection method is applied to identify the outside quadrilateral while circular hough transform is used for the recognition of inside circle. Position information on the ground landmark is uplinked to the unmanned helicopter via ground control computer in real time so that the unmanned helicopter control the air vehicle for accurate landing approach. Ground test and a couple of flight tests for autonomous landing approach show that the image processing and automatic landing operation system have good performance for the landing approach phase at the altitude of $20m{\sim}1m$ above ground level.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.1085-1091
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• 2014

This paper presents the guidance and control design for automatic carrier landing of a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). Differently from automatic landing on a runway on the ground, the motion of a carrier deck is not fixed and affected by external factors such as ship movement and sea state. For this reason, robust guidance/control law is required for safe shipboard landing by taking the relative geometry between the UAV and the carrier deck into account. In this work, linear quadratic optimal controller and longitudinal/lateral trajectory tracking guidance algorithm are developed based on a linear UAV model. The feasibility of the proposed control scheme and guidance law for the carrier landing are verified via numerical simulations using X-Plane and Matlab/simulink.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.608-614
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• 2008

This paper describes a location tracking system to guide landing process of an Unmanned Helicopter(UMH) exploiting MIT Cricket nodes. For automatic landing of a UMH, a precise positioning system is indispensable. However, GPS(Global Positioning System) is inadequate for tracking the three dimensional position of a UMH because of large positioning errors. The Cricket systems use Time-Difference-of-Arrival(TDoA) method with ultrasonic and RF(Radio Frequency) signals to measure distances. They operate in passive mode in that a listener attached to a moving device receives distance signals from several beacons located at fixed points on ground. Inevitably, this passive type of implementation causes large disturbances in measuring distances between beacons and the listener due to wind blow from propeller and turbulence of UMH body. To cope with this problem, we proposed active type of implementation for positioning a UMH. In this implementation, a beacon is set up at UMH body and four listeners are located at ground area at least where the UMH will land. A pair of Ultrasonic and RF signals from the beacon arrives at several listeners to calculate the position of the UMH. The distance signals among listeners are synchronized with a counter value appended to each distance signals from the beacon.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.11 no.8
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• pp.726-732
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• 2005

This paper proposes an autolanding guidance and control algorithm with the lateral guidance law. This algorithm is basically formulated and designed in feedback linearization based on singular perturbation. Main features of this algorithm are two facts. One of those is that when a certain situation happens that airplane must realign to the runway suddenly assigned due to unexpected environment change around the landing site, the heading guidance in this algorithm is very valuable, and the other is the fact that the inner loop control of this algorithm is able to be designed directly based on the Handling Quality Requirements that most flight control systems must be satisfied with. To illustrate the potential of this algorithm, 6-DOF nonlinear simulation based on the nonlinear airplane model shown in Ref.[11] is carried out. The simulation results showed that the altitude response to the given landing trajectory is accurate, and the airplane heading alignment to the assigned runway from the lateral deviation is successful. It is noted that this algorithm is also applicable to unmanned aerial vehicle, which can be retrieved in autolanding technique, where the runway far retrieving the vehicle is in any direction for example at war field.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.289-295
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• 2015

This paper describes a ground monocular vision-based measurement algorithm measuring relative range and position of aircraft using the information of wingspan and optical parameters for the camera. A technique obtaining an aircraft image is also described in this paper. This technique can be used as external measurement for autonomous landing instead of ILS. To verify the performance of these algorithms, flight experiment is performed using light sport aircraft with GPS and monocular camera. Finally we obtained the reasonable RMSE of 1.85m is obtained.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.225-232
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• 2014

In this study, a cooperative UAV and UGV platform is proposed to obtain a wide range of visual information. The UAV recognizes a pattern marker on UGV and tracks the UGV without user control. It can provide wide range of visual information for a user in the UGV. The UGV by a user is controled equipped with an aluminum board. And the UAV can take off and land on the UGV. The UAV uses two cameras; one camera is used to recognize a pattern marker and another is used to provide a wide range of visual information to the UGV's user. It is guaranteed that the proposed visual-based approach detects and tracks the target marker on the UGV, and then lands well. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively construct a cooperative UAV/UGV platform for obtaining a wide range of vision information.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.262-269
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• 2016

Flight of an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) generally consists of four steps; take-off, ascent, descent, and finally landing. Among them, autonomous landing is a challenging task due to high risks and reliability problem. In case the landing site where the UAV is supposed to land is moving or oscillating, the situation becomes more unpredictable and it is far more difficult than landing on a stationary site. For these reasons, the accurate and precise control is required for an autonomous landing system of a UAV on top of a moving vehicle which is rolling or oscillating while moving. In this paper, a vision-only based landing algorithm using dynamic gimbal control is proposed. The conventional camera systems which are applied to the previous studies are fixed as downward facing or forward facing. The main disadvantage of these system is a narrow field of view (FOV). By controlling the gimbal to track the target dynamically, this problem can be ameliorated. Furthermore, the system helps the UAV follow the target faster than using only a fixed camera. With the artificial tag on a landing pad, the relative position and orientation of the UAV are acquired, and those estimated poses are used for gimbal control and UAV control for safe and stable landing on a moving vehicle. The outdoor experimental results show that this vision-based algorithm performs fairly well and can be applied to real situations.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.50 no.12
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• pp.857-866
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• 2022

Fixed-wing UAVs have long endurance and range capabilities compared to other aerial platforms. These advantages led fixed-wing UAVs to become a popular platform for reconnaissance missions in the military. In this research, we modeled fixed-wing UAVs, including the landing gear model and developed a guidance and control system for flight control computers to construct a HILS environment. We also developed an autopilot system that includes automated take-off, cruise, and landing control for UAVs. We also retrived the Aerodynamic coefficients an UAV using Datcom and AVL software and used them for 6 degrees of freedom modeling. The Flight control computer calculates guidance commands using the Carrot chasing guidance law after distinguishing the condition of the UAV based on 16 pre-defined flight modes and calculates control inputs using Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (NDI) control scheme. We used RTNngine to integrate the Simulink model and flight control computer for HILS environment formulation.