Vision technology for precision landing of agricultural autonomous rotorcraft

Landing operations for small agricultural helicopters and, in general, docking operations between two vehicles, constitute an ongoing engineering challenge. This is due, in part, to the lack of small-sized and reliable local navigation system. This paper proposes a new, vision-based local navigation system that enables 6 degrees-of-freedom navigation for landing small airborne vehicles. The salient feature of our system is the design of a target that generates easily visible interference fringes, along with easily recognizable features. Following the theoretical aspects to our design, we describe a limited experiment showing the efficacy of our design.