Landing platforms’ automation is aimed at servicing vertical take-off and landing UAVs between flights and maintaining their airworthiness. Over the last few years, different designs for the landing platforms have been proposed. This shows a strong development and establishment of automatic landing platforms with UAV positioning devices on the landing site. Positioning and safe fixation of the UAV are some of the main features of the landing platform, especially if it is mounted on a movable vehicle. This article focuses exclusively on the landing platform and its elements that provide the positioning of the UAV by affecting it during and after the landing. Both active devices and mechanisms and passive elements used for positioning are considered. This article, based on the review of recent patents and publications, gives the classification of positioning approaches used in landing stations with the analysis of the required landing precision, as well as the pros and cons of each type of approach.

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Abstract. The paper shows approach of unmanned surface vehicle motion planning in an environment with obstacles. The structure of the control system hardware, software architecture, based on client-server model with the loose coupling in ROS software environment, is presented. Global planner is designed using the method of Generalized Voronoi Diagrams. Local planner is implemented using the unstable regimes of control to bypass obstacles near USV. The results of simulation, which showed the efficiency of the proposed approaches, are presented.

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Testing and debugging of real equipment is a time consuming task. In particular, in the case of marine robots, it is necessary each time to carry out the transportation and deployment of a robot on the water. Experiments with not yet fully functional prototype of marine robot equipped with expensive hardware is in the meantime very risky. Therefore, the use of simulators is affordable way to accelerate the development of robotic systems from the viewpoint of labor effort and cost of experiments. This paper presents a simulator specifically designed for autonomous unmanned underwater vehicles.

This paper proposes a method for simultaneously planning a path and a sequence of deformations for a tensegrity drone. Previous work in the field required the use of bounding surfaces, making the planning more conservative. The proposed method takes advantage of the need to use mixed-integer variables in choosing the drone path (using big-M relaxation) to simultaneously choose the configuration of the drone, eliminating the need to use semidefinite matrices to encode configurations, as was done previously. The numerical properties of the algorithm are demonstrated in numerical studies. To show the viability of tensegrity drones, the first tensegrity quadrotor Tensodrone was build. The Tensodrone is based on a six-bar tensegrity structure that is inherently compliant and can withstand crash landings and frontal collisions with obstacles. This makes the robot safe for the humans around it and protects the drone itself during aggressive maneuvers in constrained and cluttered environments, a feature that is becoming increasingly important for challenging applications that include cave exploration and indoor disaster response.