Filip Novák presents State estimation of marine vessels affected by waves by unmanned aerial vehicles

A novel approach for robust state estimation of marine vessels in rough water
is
proposed in this paper to enable tight collaboration between Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles (UAVs) and a marine vessel, such as cooperative landing or object
manipulation, regardless of weather conditions. Our study of marine vessel (in
our case Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV)) dynamics influenced by strong wave
motion has resulted in a novel nonlinear mathematical USV model with 6 degrees
of freedom (DOFs), which is required for precise USV state estimation and
motion
prediction. The proposed state estimation and prediction approach fuses data
from multiple sensors onboard the UAV and the USV to enable redundancy and
robustness under varying weather conditions of real-world applications. The
proposed approach provides estimated states of the USV with 6 DOFs and predicts
its future states to enable tight control of both vehicles on a receding
control
horizon. The proposed approach was extensively tested in the realistic Gazebo
simulator and successfully experimentally validated in many real-world
experiments representing different application scenarios, including agile
landing on an oscillating and moving USV. A comparative study indicates that
the
proposed approach significantly surpassed the current state-of-the-art

Reference:
Filip Novák, Tomáš Báča, Ondřej Procházka and Martin Saska. State
estimation of marine vessels affected by waves by unmanned aerial vehicles.
Ocean Engineering 323:120606, 2025.

Seminar will be held in short format of 20 minutes.

Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oceaneng.2025.120606
Videos: https://mrs.fel.cvut.cz/papers/usv-state-estimation