Fast and Automatic Dock for Precise UAV Landing on a USV in Marine Environment
摘要
The cooperative system of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) have been widely applied in the marine field and show great potential. However, limited by the endurance of UAVs, achieving the safe recovery and landing of UAVs in the disturbed marine environment has become an urgent problem to be solved. This paper proposes a solution that enables UAVs to land precisely and safely on a USV and be locked in the disturbed marine environment. The proposed solution is elaborately demonstrated and verified through docking design, landing simulation, and field experiments. Specifically, using the visual information from ArUco markers, UAVs can automatically identify the landing platform and dock with it, establishing a tethered-UAV system for subsequent landing. This study simulates the automatic identification process of the landing platform by UAVs in a simulated marine environment are driven by actual disturbance data and further conduct multiple sets of outdoor landing experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed system can effectively achieve the precise landing and positioning of UAVs. Notably, the proposed solution achieves the autonomous landing of UAVs under Sea State II conditions for the first time. Moreover, this method can lock UAVs within a limited space, enabling multiple UAVs to land on one USV. It also provides possibilities for post-landing operations such as energy replenishment.