Graph Attention-Based Distillation for Self-Alignment Localization of UAV Wireless Charging

To address the residual lateral coil misalignment after an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) lands on a fixed wireless-charging platform, this study proposes a graph-attention-based knowledge distillation method for embedded self-alignment localization. Four detection-coil voltages form an induced-voltage fingerprint database organized as a multi-scale spatial graph. A graph attention network (GAT) teacher model is trained offline to learn neighborhood correlations in the voltage–position mapping, and its spatial knowledge is distilled into a lightweight Tiny-MLP student model for microcontroller unit (MCU)-based online inference. Experimental results show that the GAT teacher achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.589 cm, while the distilled Tiny-MLP reduces the MAE of the directly trained Tiny-MLP from 1.548 cm to 1.148 cm (a 25.8% reduction under a fixed seed). In 2000 closed-loop alignment trials with random initial positions, the system achieves an 85.5% success rate under a 0.5 cm threshold, indicating that the method supports low-complexity closed-loop self-alignment for UAV wireless charging.