AeroLite-MDNet: Lightweight Multi-task Deviation Detection Network for UAV Landing
This addresses the challenge of safe UAV landings for operators in applications like surveying and monitoring, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing vision-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of accurate UAV landing by proposing a vision-based deviation warning system, achieving a deviation detection accuracy of 98.6% with an average warning delay of 0.7 seconds.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly employed in diverse applications such as land surveying, material transport, and environmental monitoring. Following missions like data collection or inspection, UAVs must land safely at docking stations for storage or recharging, which is an essential requirement for ensuring operational continuity. However, accurate landing remains challenging due to factors like GPS signal interference. To address this issue, we propose a deviation warning system for UAV landings, powered by a novel vision-based model called AeroLite-MDNet. This model integrates a multiscale fusion module for robust cross-scale object detection and incorporates a segmentation branch for efficient orientation estimation. We introduce a new evaluation metric, Average Warning Delay (AWD), to quantify the system's sensitivity to landing deviations. Furthermore, we contribute a new dataset, UAVLandData, which captures real-world landing deviation scenarios to support training and evaluation. Experimental results show that our system achieves an AWD of 0.7 seconds with a deviation detection accuracy of 98.6\%, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing UAV landing reliability. Code will be available at https://github.com/ITTTTTI/Maskyolo.git