Vision-Based Autonomous Landing of a Quadrotor on the Perturbed Deck of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle

Abstract

Autonomous landing on the deck of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) is still a major challenge for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this paper, a fiducial marker is located on the platform so as to facilitate the task since it is possible to retrieve its six-degrees of freedom relative-pose in an easy way. To compensate interruption in the marker's observations, an extended Kalman filter (EKF) estimates the current USV's position with reference to the last known position. Validation experiments have been performed in a simulated environment under various marine conditions. The results confirmed that the EKF provides estimates accurate enough to direct the UAV in proximity of the autonomous vessel such that the marker becomes visible again. Using only the odometry and the inertial measurements for the estimation, this method is found to be applicable even under adverse weather conditions in the absence of the global positioning system.

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“…As remote sensing techniques become increasingly popular, unmanned robots such as aerial and surface vehicles (UAV and USV) are making their way into diverse fields by providing access to new technology approaches to data collection along with the augmented accessibility provided by these platforms [1,2]. This application of unmanned robots can be used to access dangerous sites or places where traditional manned sensing techniques are impossible to implement, and are being widely adopted in various fields such as [3][4][5].…”

“…In limnological studies manual sampling techniques are usually tedious or sometimes dangerous to perform. And the commonly lead to an increased probability of inaccurate or faulty results due to erroneous field practices [1]. Besides this, autonomous platforms tend to provide a reliable permanent record of the measured conditions which makes revisiting and comparison over time possible and effortless.…”

Robust Visual-Aided Autonomous Takeoff, Tracking, and Landing of a Small UAV on a Moving Landing Platform for Life-Long Operation

“…Using a single robot under such conditions poses big difficulties: whether it moves on the surface or flies nearby areas, there are intrinsic difficulties for each type of robot. Thus, by building heterogeneous teams of robotic platforms that can jointly operate in such scenarios, it is possible to bring about great benefits, since the shortcomings of each robot can be compensated with the strengths of the other [3,4].…”

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“…In addition, it is possible to find recent works that study the problem of landing in an oscillating platform by using visual sensors. For instance, the authors of [8] used a fiducial marker to obtain the pose of the platform and implemented an External Kalman Filter (EKF) to estimate the ship position. Simulations provide very accurate results by using only the odometry and the inertial measurements for the estimation.…”