A Lightweight Toggleable Adhesion Prototype for Multirotor UAV Landing on Tilting Platforms
For autonomous maritime operations, this work addresses the challenge of reliable UAV landing on wave-tilted surfaces with a simple, effective adhesion method.
This paper presents a lightweight toggleable adhesion mechanism for multirotor UAVs that improves landing success on tilting platforms from 40% to 80% at tilts up to 43 degrees, using a simple vertical PID controller.
Autonomous multirotor landings on uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) are critical for persistent maritime operations but remain challenging due to wave-induced tilt, wind disturbances, and limited landing area. Many existing approaches exhibit small pose tolerance for reliable landing. This paper presents a lightweight toggleable adhesion mechanism to improve landing reliability. The system uses a motor-driven corkscrew that engages hook-and-loop material on the landing surface, enabling active adhesion during landing and controlled release during takeoff. We evaluate a prototype using a modified Crazyflie 2.0 and a custom tilting platform at fixed angles representative of extreme wave conditions. Using only a simple vertical PID controller, the proposed approach increases landing success from an average of 40% (baseline) to 80% across platform tilts up to 43 degrees using appropriately selected actuation settings.