Autonomous UAV surveillance of a ship's path with MPC for maritime situational awareness

Abstract

Abstract-Maritime Situational Awareness is crucial in maritime operations to identify threats and to deal with them as soon as possible. These threats can be pirates in shipping operations, icebergs when sailing in the northern sea routes, or even unknown vessels or objects that might be on the ship's path. A solution to identify these threats is the use of UAV's to overfly the ship's planned path. This solution is described in this paper, using an autonomous fixed wing UAV. Based on the provided ship's planned path, the UAV should autonomously map the area close to the ship track. To do that, an optimization problem is solved using Model Predictive Control, where the turn rate for the next time period is optimized. Based on the turn rate, the future path of the UAV is calculated and the waypoints are sent to the autopilot. This application is thoroughly tested using a Software In Loop environment, where an aircraft model is used with the autopilot's simulation. The results show that surveillance performance is improved if the UAV has information about the ship's velocity in addition to position.

Digitalizing maritime transport: digital innovation as a catalyzer of sustainable transformation

“…The general trend is that various digital solutions help vessels become aware of their surroundings, which is often referred to as situational awareness (Andrade et al 2017). The relevant data are collected on ships through various sensors such as radars and lidars v .…”

Closing the Gap in Swarm Robotics Simulations: An Extended Ardupilot/Gazebo plugin

“…By providing these tools, ardupilot is also, on a simulation level, meant to narrow the reality gap. Consequently, Ardupilot is already used in single-UAV research [5], a fact which indicates that Ardupilot-powered vehicles may become a tendency in the future, hence justifying its improvement to swarm applications.…”

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Double Hybrid Tailsitter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle With Vertical Takeoff and Landing

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