Enabling Technologies for Autonomous Offshore Inspections by Heterogeneous Unmanned Teams

This paper presents a concept for a heterogeneous unmanned team designed for autonomous persistent inspection of offshore wind turbines. This team consists of an unmanned surface vessel (USV) and an unmanned aerial system (UAS) operating cooperatively. We describe a concept of operations (CONOPS) in which the USV acts as a ground control station (GCS) for the UAS. The USV shuttles the UAS between turbines, recharges the UAS batteries, and provides a long-range data link to a remote operator. Near each turbine, the UAS is deployed from the USV, performs an inspection, and then returns to the USV so that it can transit to a different offshore wind turbine and initialize another inspection. This paper discusses the key enabling technologies required to field such a system, with focus on the problem of performing autonomous high-precision launch and landing of a UAS from a USV.