In this paper, we focus on the rendezvous problem for the autonomous
cooperative landing of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on an unmanned surface
vehicle (USV). These heterogeneous agents with nonlinear dynamics are
dynamically decoupled but share a common cooperative rendezvous task. The
underlying control scheme is based on the Distributed Model Predictive Control
(MPC). One of our main contributions is a rendezvous algorithm with an online
update rule of the rendezvous location. The algorithm requires that agents
update the rendezvous location only when they are not guaranteed to reach it.
Therefore, the exchange of information occurs aperiodically and proposed
algorithm improves the communication efficiency. Furthermore, we prove the
recursive feasibility of the algorithm. The simulation results show the
effectiveness of our algorithm applied to the problem of autonomous cooperative
landing.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, This work has been submitted to IFAC for possible
publication, 7th IFAC Conference on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control 202