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Autonomous Landing of Rotary Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles on Underway Ships in a Sea State

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Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be further optimized as tools on-board ships with the development of lacking infrastructure, like their recovery at sea. Current technologies focus on vision-based systems with little consideration for ship motion. A novel autonomous landing technique is tested experimentally, featuring acoustic positioning to allow for landings in a wider breadth of conditions and to reduce the reliance on specially designed landing targets. A potential fields path planner is used to adapt for ship motion and provide obstacle avoidance and natural biasing away from the heaving ship deck. A sea state predictor is used to compensate for harsher sea conditions and ship motion, allowing the UAV to look for appropriate landing windows in higher sea states. Autonomous landings are demonstrated in a lab setting for sea conditions up to, and including, sea state 5. The ship motions are defined using real sea trials data from the decommissioned HMCS Nipigon.

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Code Availability

All software used is open source and available on github.

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Funding

Funding for the project was provided by The Marine Environmental Observation, Prediction and Response Network (MEOPAR), the Irving Shipbuilding Research Chair on Marine Engineering and Autonomous Systems and the NSERC chair in Design Engineering.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

    Jordan Ross, Mae Seto & Clifton Johnston

Authors
  1. Jordan Ross
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  2. Mae Seto
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  3. Clifton Johnston
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Contributions

MS and CJ conceived and presented the idea. MS and CJ secured the funding and built the project time line. JR developed the theory, designed the code and experimental platform, performed the experiments and analysed the data with the support of MS and CJ. JR, MS and CJ wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jordan Ross.

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This work uses data made available by DRDC. This information is not in the public domain.

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Ross, J., Seto, M. & Johnston, C. Autonomous Landing of Rotary Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles on Underway Ships in a Sea State. J Intell Robot Syst 104, 1 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01515-x

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