CurviTrack: Curvilinear Trajectory Tracking for High-speed Chase of a USV

Heterogeneous robot teams used in marine environments incur time-and-energy penalties when the marine vehicle has to halt the mission to allow the autonomous aerial vehicle to land for recharging. In this paper, we present a solution for this problem using a novel drag-aware model formulation which is coupled with MPC, and therefore, enables tracking and landing during high-speed curvilinear trajectories of an USV without any communication. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our approach yields 40% decrease in prediction errors, and provides a 3-fold increase in certainty of predictions. Consequently, this leads to a 30% improvement in tracking performance and 40% higher success in landing on a moving USV even during aggressive turns that are unfeasible for conventional marine missions. We test our approach in two different real-world scenarios with marine vessels of two different sizes and further solidify our results through statistical analysis in simulation to demonstrate the robustness of our method.

Model predictive control-based trajectory generation for agile landing of unmanned aerial vehicle on a moving boat

This paper proposes a novel trajectory generation method based on Model Predictive Control (MPC) for agile landing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) onto an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV)'s deck in harsh conditions. The trajectory generation exploits the state predictions of the USV to create periodically updated trajectories for a multirotor UAV to precisely land on the deck of a moving USV even in cases where the deck's inclination is continuously changing. We use an MPC-based scheme to create trajectories that consider both the UAV dynamics and the predicted states of the USV up to the first derivative of position and orientation. Compared to existing approaches, our method dynamically modifies the penalization matrices to precisely follow the corresponding states with respect to the flight phase. Especially during the landing maneuver, the UAV synchronizes attitude with the USV's, allowing for fast landing on a tilted deck. Simulations show the method's reliability in various sea conditions up to Rough sea (wave height 4 m), outperforming state-of-the-art methods in landing speed and accuracy, with twice the precision on average. Finally, real-world experiments validate the simulation results, demonstrating robust landings on a moving USV, while all computations are performed in real-time onboard the UAV.

State Estimation of Marine Vessels Affected by Waves by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

A novel approach for robust state estimation of marine vessels in rough water is proposed in this paper to enable tight collaboration between Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and a marine vessel, such as cooperative landing or object manipulation, regardless of weather conditions. Our study of marine vessel (in our case Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV)) dynamics influenced by strong wave motion has resulted in a novel nonlinear mathematical USV model with 6 degrees of freedom (DOFs), which is required for precise USV state estimation and motion prediction. The proposed state estimation approach fuses data from multiple sensors onboard the UAV and the USV to enable redundancy and robustness under varying weather conditions of real-world applications. The proposed approach provides estimated states of the USV with 6 DOFs and predicts its future states to enable tight control of both vehicles on a receding control horizon. The proposed approach was extensively tested in the realistic Gazebo simulator and successfully experimentally validated in many real-world experiments representing different application scenarios, including agile landing on an oscillating and moving USV. A comparative study indicates that the proposed approach significantly surpassed the current state-of-the-art.

Towards UAV-USV Collaboration in Harsh Maritime Conditions Including Large Waves

This paper introduces a system designed for tight collaboration between Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) in harsh maritime conditions characterized by large waves. This onboard UAV system aims to enhance collaboration with USVs for following and landing tasks under such challenging conditions. The main contribution of our system is the novel mathematical USV model, describing the movement of the USV in 6 degrees of freedom on a wavy water surface, which is used to estimate and predict USV states. The estimator fuses data from multiple global and onboard sensors, ensuring accurate USV state estimation. The predictor computes future USV states using the novel mathematical USV model and the last estimated states. The estimated and predicted USV states are forwarded into a trajectory planner that generates a UAV trajectory for following the USV or landing on its deck, even in harsh environmental conditions. The proposed approach was verified in numerous simulations and deployed to the real world, where the UAV was able to follow the USV and land on its deck repeatedly.