Abstract

Heterogeneous robot teams used in marine environments incur time-and-energy penalties when the marine vehicle has to halt the mission to allow the autonomous aerial vehicle to land for recharging. In this paper, we present a solution for this problem using a novel drag-aware model formulation which is coupled with MPC, and therefore, enables tracking and landing during high-speed curvilinear trajectories of a USV without any communication. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our approach yields 40% decrease in prediction errors, and provides a 3-fold increase in certainty of predictions. Consequently, this leads to a 30% improvement in tracking performance and 40% higher success in landing on a moving usv, even during aggressive turns. We test our approach in two different real-world scenarios with marine vessels of two different sizes and further solidify our results through a statistical analysis in simulation to demonstrate the robustness of our method.

Links

PDF: https://mrs.fel.cvut.cz/data/papers/ral_curvitrack_2025.pdf
Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.21303
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2025.3546079

Video

This video highlights the results of simulations and two types of real-world conditions. We discuss the approach and describe the outcomes of the applied methods.