Conference Publication

J. L. Sanchez-Lopez, S. Saripalli, P. Campoy, J. Pestana, C. Fu. Toward Visual Autonomous Ship Board Landing of a VTOL UAV. 2013 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS). IEEE. e-ISSN: 2575-7296. pp. 779-788. Print ISBN: 978-1-4799-0815-8. Online ISBN: 978-1-4799-0817-2. 2013. DOI: 10.1109/ICUAS.2013.6564760.

Resources:

Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICUAS.2013.6564760
Bibtex citation: Bibtex

Abstract:
In this paper we tackle the problem of landing a helicopter autonomously on a ship deck, using as the main sensor, an on-board colour camera. To create a test-bed, we first adequately simulate the movement of a ship landing platform on the Sea, for different Sea States, for different ships, randomly and realistically enough. We use a commercial parallel robot to get this movement. Once we had this, we developed an accurate and robust computer vision system to measure the pose of the helipad with respect to the on-board camera. To deal with the noise and the possible fails of the computer vision, a state estimator was created. With all of this, we are now able to develop and test a controller that closes the loop and finish the autonomous landing task.

Dr. Jose-Luis SANCHEZ-LOPEZ