A Time and Place to Land

Cooperation between an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and unmanned surface vehicle (USV) can be critical in fields like search and rescue, marine ecology, and surveying. This is because, by landing a UAV on a USV for recharging, the agents can collaborate to eliminate their individual limitations; UAVs typically have a superior speed and vantage point compared to USVs, but can only remain airborne for short periods of time due to battery limitations, whereas USVs lack mobility and height but can remain at sea for extended periods of time and carry large batteries. The question our work this summer sought to answer is: how can we get a UAV-USV pair to seek out ”calm waters” and attempt a landing when and where the waves are most favorable? Due to the high risk associated with testing such a system on a real body of water, we developed a novel testbed that utilizes an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) fitted with a custom-made 2-axis tilting landing pad that can pitch and roll to simulate the motion of a USV in a variety of wave conditions. We used this novel testbed with an indoor Crazyflie UAV to experimentally prove a cooperative model-predictive control (MPC) scheme. In essence, MPC works by optimizing control inputs using a model that encodes the dynamics of a system to pick the best series of control inputs from a finite set of valid inputs. Our work successfully proved the viability of a system where two agents use MPC to optimize their relative positions and the intensity of nearby waves to reach consensus on where and when to land. By landing 100+ times using a variety of system configurations, we were able to demonstrate a significantly increased likelihood of successful landings when using our control scheme.