Abstract This paper introduces a new equipment, which allows autonomous landing and docking of a VTOL aircraft and any mobile system. It has been studied and developed inside the MAAT (Multibody Advanced Airship for Transport) EU FP7 project to control autonomous docking of manned cruiser and feeder airships in movement. After a detailed analysis it has been veriied that It could be considered a technological spin off the MAAT project. It deines a new instrumental system for governing relative positioning between a movable target and VTOL air vehicles, such as helicopters, airships and multi- copters. This solution is expected to become a short time to market equipment for helicopters (both manned and unmanned) ensuring autonomous landing ability even in case of low visibility. Infrared emitters allow controlling both position and yaws angle. It is in advanced testing phase after a preliminary successful testing using a quadcopter. Tests has produced autonomous landing on a small platform mounted on an unmanned vehicle. In some experiments also landing on a target in movement has performed. The proposed solution is an alternative to more sophisticated vision based controls. It ensures high affordability, high simplicity and low costs. In addition, this concept can equip any ixed and mobile platform and open the novel scenario for autonomous scout vehicles equipped by UAVs. Introduction Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are necessary for various missions where human intervention is impossible, risky or expensive (i.e. recovery of hazardous material, trafic monitoring, disaster relief support etc). UAVs are expanding the range of applications in an increasing number of ields and applications. They relates monitoring and surveillance, but also supporting civil protection operations in case of disaster, and TLCs. MAAT Project (acronym of Multibody Advanced Airship for Transport) is an EU inanced project aiming to design a feeder airship [1, 2]. One of the most important activities regards the study of autonomous joint operations between cruiser and feeder [3]. It required an effective preliminary study on different methods to ensure an autonomous docking of the cruiser and feeder. This study has started by an effective analysis of directions through autonomous landing systems. Most of the effort of today academic and industrial research focuses on image recognition technologies. They use differential GPS and cameras to ensure landing or docking with the necessary accuracy. These systems have tested with some degree of success, but they present some disadvantages including setup dificulties. The nature of landing makes it suitable for vision-based state estimation and control. The vision problem is a special case of the ego-motion problem where the feature points lay on a plane (i.e. a landing pad) [4]. The helicopter needs to locate, recognize a landing pad, align with it and land on it autonomously. Vision-based robot control is still an active topic of research. Several vision-based techniques have studied for autonomous control of helicopters. An interesting project has produced by Sinopoli [5]. Amidi and others [6] have presented visual odometers for controlling light operations of a UAV. Ma and others [7] has analyzed the problem of vision-guided navigation of robotic systems. For a nonholonomic mobile robot, Lazanas and Latombe [8] has considered the opportunity of deining a landmark based recognition system. Hutchison [9] has presented the general architecture of a robotic system. Sharp and others [10] has realized a real time computer vision system capable of tracking a landing target Infrared Piloted Autonomous Landing: System Design and Experimental Evaluation 2014-01-2196 Published 09/16/2014 Massimo Conte Aerosekur Michele Trancossi Universita di Modena e Reggio Emilia CITATION: Conte, M. and Trancossi, M., "Infrared Piloted Autonomous Landing: System Design and Experimental Evaluation," SAE Technical Paper 2014-01-2196, 2014, doi:10.4271/2014-01-2196. Copyright © 2014 SAE International Downloaded from SAE International by Michele Trancossi, Friday, September 26, 2014