Landing an autonomous air vehicle on a moving ground platform is an important capability for many missions but presents unique engineering challenges. This paper presents a robust autonomous landing system for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) consisting of a magnetic dock and a visual servoing controller that uses a tailored set of infrared (IR) beacons. The UAV is equipped with actuated magnetic feet that allow it to “stick” to the docking pad during landing, but easily release from it during takeoff. The IR beacon array is designed so that landing can be performed in a variety of lighting and weather conditions, adding significant robustness to the system. The system is also designed to recharge the UAV battery after landing. Experimental results demonstrate that the prototype system can execute autonomous landings on a moving ground vehicle in outdoor environments at up to 4.5m/s (10 mph).
The goal of this research is to establish control theoretic methods to enhance cyber security of networked motion control systems by utilizing somewhat homomorphic encryption. The proposed approach will encrypt the entire motion control schemes including: sensor signals, model parameters, feedback gains, and performs computation in the ciphertext space to generate motion commands to servo systems without a security hole. The paper will discuss implementation of encrypted bilateral teleoperation control schemes with nonlinear friction compensation. The paper will present (1) encrypted teleoperation control realization with somewhat homomorphic encryption and (2) simulation results.