As part of my testing a rig has been set up in the front yard involving a rope between the roof and a tree in the yard which allowed me to test the copter repeatedly and ensure that any changes I made don't destabilize the craft or cause fly aways. Once the software has been proven to not cause problems and the copter had managed to perform its task while tethered a few untethered flights were performed in a reserve far away from people, power lines and buildings.

It has been a slow and long process ,but finally I have managed to achieve a set of results that can be considered a working prototype system. The copter has been able to reliably detect and center itself over the target them bring itself down onto the target with a 10cm error outdoors which should be fine as the docking station is being designed to deal with that much error. Currently the system is a little slow with actuating itself over the target but this is past of slowly building up confidence in the system and taking it slow for safety reasons both for the copter and myself.

Possible improvements:
I can also improve my results when I switch over to a better state estimation when I can finish off the EKF design and I think velocity based control  for the positional control will work better than attitude based. As well as implementing a sliding mode controller rather than cascaded PID loops