UAV PERFORMING AUTONOMOUS LANDING ON USV UTILIZING THE ROBOT OPERATING SYSTEM

Abstract

This paper outlines the design and implementation of the launching and landing of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) onto an unmanned surface vehicle (USV). The US Navy and Northrop Grumman’s X-47B drone have just recently achieved the first autonomous landing of an aircraft onto an aircraft carrier, but it came at the price tag of over one billion U.S. dollars. The authors of this paper will create a scaled-down model of this system that will cost in the order of thousands of dollars. The aerial vehicle utilized in this study is a quadrotor helicopter, which greatly simplifies the launching and landing process. The surface vehicle used is an autonomous boat that features a catamaran-style hull. Both vehicles will use the Robotic Operation System (ROS) as a framework for their software. A successful mission for this system would be one in which the quadrotor launches from the launch pad of the boat, navigates to a series of GPS waypoints, lands at a predetermined location to pick up an object, navigates back to the boat, and then lands successfully to the USV.