In order to make an unmanned helicopter land on a landmark with GPS information, we have to know its position with one-meter accuracy. It is not practical to know beforehand a point with such accuracy. Therefore this paper proposes an autonomous landing system of an unmanned helicopter using GPS-based navigation globally, and also using image-based navigation locally. To search and track a landmark, we introduce an active image sensor, which can actively change the angle of view and the camera direction. The performance of the proposed system is shown by experiments using an unmanned helicopter “RMAX” for industrial use.
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Nakamura et al. (2000) studied this question.