A novel concept—the contact-based landing on a mobile platform—is proposed in this paper. An adaptive backstepping controller is designed to deal with the unknown disturbances in the interactive process, and the contact-based landing mission is implemented under the hybrid force/motion control framework. A rotorcraft aerial vehicle system and a ground mobile platform are designed to conduct flight experiments, evaluating the feasibility of the proposed landing scheme and control strategy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a rotorcraft unmanned aerial vehicle has been implemented to conduct a contact-based landing. To improve system autonomy in future applications, vision-based recognition and localization methods are studied, contributing to the detection of a partially occluded cooperative object or at a close range. The proposed recognition algorithms are tested on a ground platform and evaluated in several simulated scenarios, indicating the algorithm’s effectiveness.

To address the shortcomings of existing methods for rotorcraft searching, positioning, tracking and landing on a ship at sea, a dual-channel LIDAR searching, positioning, tracking and landing system (DCLSPTLS) is proposed in this paper, which utilises the multi-pulse laser echoes accumulation method and the physical phenomenon that the laser reflectivity of the ship deck in the near-infrared band is four orders of magnitude higher than that of the sea surface. The DCLSPTLS searching and positioning model, tracking model and landing model are established, respectively. The searching and positioning model can provide estimates of the azimuth angle, the distance of the ship relative to the rotorcraft and the ship's course. With the above parameters as inputs, the total tracking time and the direction of the rotorcraft tracking speed can be obtained by using the tracking model. The landing model can calculate the pitch and the roll angles of the ship's deck relative to the rotorcraft by using the least squares method and the laser irradiation coordinates. The simulation shows that the DCLSPTLS can realise the functions of rotorcraft searching, positioning, tracking and landing by using the above parameters. To verify the effectiveness of the DCLSPTLS, a functional test is performed using a rotorcraft and a model ship on a lake. The test results are consistent with the results of the simulation.

The aeronautical industry has set for itself important environmental goals, creating the need of improved tools for measuring the polluting emissions generated by fuel burn. This paper describes a new method to estimate the fuel burn and the pollution generated by a landing approach and also for a missed approach procedure. Fuel emission estimations can be used to compare the costs of different routes. The method developed in this paper uses the Emissions Guide Book developed by the European Environment Agency as the needed database for the computations. This method gives estimations of the fuel burn and emissions, including the amounts of CO, NOx, HC, EICO, EINOx and EIHC for a given flight as its output. The flight computation is divided into two sections: one section for the aircraft's travelled distance and a second section for the time an aircraft flies under certain flight modes. Since this method computes the missed approach fuel and emissions contribution, it computes the burn for a given descent approach for a successful landing, as well as for the same descent approach with a missed approach procedure followed by a successful landing. These two landings are verified in a complete flight to study the missed approach contribution for a conventional mid-range flight. The results show that a descent with the missed approach procedure requires 5.7 times more fuel than a normal, successful descent. This extra fuel burn increases the pollution released to the atmosphere and would impact the airlines’ profit margin due to the added fuel costs and longer flight times, as well as any future economic measures imposed on the increased air and noise pollution.