NEEC Research: Toward GPS-denied Landing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles on Ships at Sea

This paper reports on a Naval Engineering Education Center (NEEC) design-build-test project focused on the development of a fully autonomous system for landing Navy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on transiting ships at sea. Our NEEC team of engineering students researched image processing techniques, estimation frameworks, and control algorithms to collaboratively learn and train in Navy-relevant autonomy. We accomplished the autonomous landing using fiducial markers detected by a camera onboard the UAV, decomposed the resulting homography into 6-degree of freedom relative-pose information between the UAV and landing platform, performed state estimation with a delayed-state extended Kalman filter, and then executed the motion control. Results for the state estimation framework and experimental tests using a motion capture system for independent ground-truth are presented. The proposed system performed successfully on a robotic testbed consisting of a micro UAV and an unmanned ground vehicle.