Helicopter ship landing using visual servoing on a moving platform

A vision-based control law has been developed and applied to a helicopter landing on a moving ship at sea. A compensation of the ship platform motion due to the waves has been provided as well, obtained through an estimation of the platform velocity. The outer, vision-based control loop is feeding an inner control loop for the stabilization through pole placement of the helicopter naturally unstable flight dynamics modes. Simulation results show good performances of the overall control loop, with an efficient compensation of the perturbations due to the ship deck motion.