Landing a UAV in harsh winds and turbulent open waters

Landing a UAV in harsh winds and turbulent open waters
Parakh M. Gupta, Eric Pairet, Tiago Nascimento, Martin Saska

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2022.3231831
Webpage : http://mrs.felk.cvut.cz/ral-landing-o...
PDF : http://mrs.felk.cvut.cz/data/papers/r...

Abstract : Landing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on top of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) in harsh open waters is a challenging problem, owing to forces that can damage the UAV due to a severe roll and/or pitch angle of the USV during touchdown. To tackle this, we propose a novel model predictive control (MPC) approach enabling a UAV to land autonomously on a USV in these harsh conditions. The MPC employs a novel objective function and an online decomposition of the oscillatory motion of the vessel in order to predict, attempt, and accomplish the landing during near-zero tilt of the landing platform. The nonlinear prediction of the motion of the vessel is performed using visual data from an onboard camera. Therefore, the system does not require any communication with the USV or a control station. The proposed method was analyzed in numerous robotics simulations in harsh and extreme conditions and further validated in various real-world scenarios.

An MRS open-source research UAV platform was used for experiments presented in this video. See http://mrs.felk.cvut.cz/system for details and source code of the MRS UAV platform, which enables all essential capabilities for research, development, and testing of novel methods. For publications describing the applied system and control stack, see
- Tomas Baca, Matej Petrlik, Matous Vrba, Vojtech Spurny, Robert Penicka, Daniel Hert and Martin Saska. The MRS UAV System: Pushing the Frontiers of Reproducible Research, Real-world Deployment, and Education with Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems 102(26):1–28, May 2021.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...

- T Baca, D Hert, G Loianno, M Saska and V Kumar. Model Predictive Trajectory Tracking and Collision Avoidance for Reliable Outdoor Deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. In 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). 2018, 1–8.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/...

- D. Hert et al., "MRS Modular UAV Hardware Platforms for Supporting Research in Real-World Outdoor and Indoor Environments," 2022 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), 2022, pp. 1264-1273, doi: 10.1109/ICUAS54217.2022.983608 (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/...)

This work was accomplished by the MRS group at CTU in Prague http://mrs.felk.cvut.cz . For more experiments with the MRS UAV research platforms, see http://mrs.felk.cvut.cz/publications

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:07 Simulation
1:11 Real-World #1
2:06 Real-World #2
2:24 Real-World with Wind
2:44 Montage