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.
@article{arxiv.2604.21078,
title = {Impact-Aware Model Predictive Control for UAV Landing on a Heaving Platform},
author = {Jess Stephenson and Melissa Greeff},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.21078},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
To be published in the proceedings of International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) World Congress 2026