Impact-Aware Model Predictive Control for UAV Landing on a Heaving Platform

2026-04-22

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) landing on a heaving maritime platform, where large impact forces and post-impact bouncing—caused by relative vertical motion—often lead to landing failure. To mitigate this, the authors propose a model predictive control (MPC) framework that explicitly incorporates impact dynamics by embedding a rigid-body collision model, based on Newton’s restitution law, into the MPC formulation as a linear complementarity problem (LCP). This novel integration enables explicit prediction of the discontinuous post-collision velocities and active suppression of rebound. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly reduces the relative velocity prior to touchdown and decreases post-landing deviation by 86.2% compared to conventional tracking MPC, thereby substantially enhancing landing stability and success rate.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: State Estimation
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair
• Humans and AI: Planning and Decision Support for Human-Machine Teams

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: LLM based quality controls for crowd work

Abstract

Landing UAVs on heaving marine platforms is challenging because relative vertical motion can generate large impact forces and cause rebound on touchdown. To address this, we develop an impact-aware Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework that models landing as a velocity-level rigid-body impact governed by Newton's restitution law. We embed this as a linear complementarity problem (LCP) within the MPC dynamics to predict the discontinuous post-impact velocity and suppress rebound. In simulation, restitution-aware prediction reduces pre-impact relative velocity and improves landing robustness. Experiments on a heaving-deck testbed show an 86.2% reduction in post-impact deflection compared to a tracking MPC.

Problem

• UAV landing
• heaving platform
• impact force
• rebound
• marine operations

Innovation

• impact-aware MPC
• linear complementarity problem
• Newton's restitution law
• heaving platform landing
• UAV rebound suppression