AUSLUN uses a drone hovering near the coast, localising itself by visual-inertial odometry, as a long-range sensor and navigation anchor for an uncrewed surface vessel when GNSS is denied. The drone scans with a zoom pod instead of flying around, localises a non-cooperative target by laser range and the cooperative USV by datalink range in one gated recursive estimator, and guides the USV to the target with recovery when visual contact is lost. GPS-referenced field data show the gated estimator beats non-recursive baselines, and a full maritime mission runs from search to navigation, including a deliberate visual-loss recovery.
Relevance
An air-sea pair in which the drone stands in for missing GNSS is close to the heterogeneous teams this diary is about. See multi-robot multimodal perception and aerial swarms; the open question is what happens when the anchor itself drifts or is spoofed.
Links
- arXiv · code
- Subfield: Field robotics, Planning and navigation, Multi-robot systems