CurviTrack: Curvilinear Trajectory Tracking for High-speed Chase of a USV

Parakh M. Gupta, Ondřej Procházka, Tiago Nascimento, Martin Saska

Keywords: Mechanics and Control, UAV, MPC, Optimisation and Optimal Control, Multi-Robot Systems, Dynamics

TL;DR: A new drag-aware model for predicting curvilinear trajectory motion using only visual-pose estimation from AprilTag

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 Model Predictive Control (MPC), and therefore, enables tracking and landing during high-speed curvilinear trajectories of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (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 that are unfeasible for conventional marine missions. We test our approach in two different real-world scenarios with marine vessels of two different sizes and further solidify our results through statistical analysis in simulation to demonstrate the robustness of our method.

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Submission Number: 2