GPS World, May 2016

WATCH MARKET UAV 2 M oving at 75 kilometers Full Speed Autonomous Landing an hour 47 mph an unmanned electric autonomous aircraft settled gently on the roof of a moving car Scient ists from the German Aerospace Center DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics combined robotics and unmannedd aerial vehicles UAVs to develop a system where a fixed wing aircraft automatically lands on a moving ground vehicle The DLR system is designed for commercial applications such as remote sensing and communication It could be applied to ultra lightweight solar aircraft that complement traditional satellite systems in the stratosphere Or it could support crisis management such as aiding disaster communications networks or providing data on climate change LOSING WEIGHT Ultralight solar aircraft can reach more than 20 kilometers in altitude The In the most critical phase of the landing maneuver the UAV flight control system must compensate for the accelerated air flow above the ground vehicle Inset The Demonstrator Platform Penguin BE UAV is equipped with redundnant landing hardware Photos DLR weight factor is crucial to how long the ultralight can stay in the air By omitting the traditional landing gear the dead weight of these UAVs can be significantly reduced This allows more load capacity greater range and better performance A lighter craft also increases payload capacity creating more space for scientific instruments 38 GPS WORLD WWW GPSWORLD COM MAY 2016 In flight tests on an airfield in Swabia Mindelheim Mattsies the DLR system was successfully tested with a 3 meter 20 kilogram electric fixed wing UAV A net was provided on the roof of a car along with optical markers The UAV can position itself up to half a meter over the 4 x 5 meter landing platform The optical multi marker tracking system detects the landing apparatus and determines the relative position of the ground vehicle with high accuracy The computer controlled landing is then carried out Movement of UAV and the vehicle are adjusted with the help of special algorithms With the car and the UAV moving at the same speed the landing is more like a settling making the landing safer and easier Though designed for both autonomous car and UAV a driver remained in the car for safety during the tests A robotic vehicle without a driver will be tested next The work was supported by the EU project EC Safe Mobile Support and complement the activities of the Flight Robotics Group In the semi autonomous landing vehicle the driver receives control commands via a graphical display The crosshairs indicate the location of the UAV Photo DLR