LANDrone: Developing Robotic Tools for Adding Non-Planar Surface Landing Capability to UAVs

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been attracting much attention and changing our daily lives. Recent technological advances in the development of UAVs have drastically increased both their general capabilities and areas of application. Among many others, one of the areas that benefit immediately from using UAVs could be remote inspection, since they can provide an alternative means of access to structures and collect data from locations difficult to reach for human inspectors. In this report, we present our advancements in developing a lightweight robotic landing gear for enabling UAVs to land on irregular surfaces. We have studied the limits and limitations of our novel design both theoretically and experimentally, leading to some further improvements. We have also studied improving the image-matching pipeline, aiming to integrate and use it while approaching and/or selecting a landing site in the long run.