Towards 3D printed modular unmanned aerial vehicle development: The landing safety paradigm

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are at the fore-front of this century's technological shift, becoming ubiquitous in research and market areas. Similarly, nowadays, 3D printing is a fast-emerging, widely used technology that allows individ-uals to design prototypes that fulfil their needs. This paper presents an autonomous UAV designed and implemented to be fully modular and 3D printable. Furthermore, suitable areas for landing are recognized using a lightweight deep learning architecture while a Gazebo model for simulation purposes is also given to the research community. Finally, its fly and surface recognition processes are evaluated exhaustively in real-world and simulation scenarios.