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 that focused on the development of a fully autonomous system for landing Navy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on transiting ships at sea. A 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 six degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) 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.