  Currently, drone research and development has received significant attention
worldwide. Particularly, delivery services employ drones as it is a viable
method to improve delivery efficiency by using a several unmanned drones.
Research has been conducted to realize complete automation of drone control for
such services. However, regarding the takeoff and landing port of the drones,
conventional methods have focused on the landing operation of a single drone,
and the continuous landing of multiple drones has not been realized. To address
this issue, we propose a completely novel port system, "EAGLES Port," that
allows several drones to continuously land and takeoff in a short time.
Experiments verified that the landing time efficiency of the proposed port is
ideally 7.5 times higher than that of conventional vertical landing systems.
Moreover, the system can tolerate 270 mm of horizontal positional error, +-30
deg of angular error in the drone's approach (+-40 deg with the proposed gate
mechanism), and up to 1.9 m/s of drone's approach speed. This technology
significantly contributes to the scalability of drone usage. Therefore, it is
critical for the development of a future drone port for the landing of
automated drone swarms.

Robotics