Visual Servoing with Feed-Forward for Precision Shipboard Landing of an Autonomous Multirotor

In this paper the problem of performing a precision landing of an autonomous multirotor on a small barge at sea is studied. An image-based visual servoing approach, which was initially developed for landing on stationary targets, is extended to suit the shipboard landing case. The approach includes visual servoing for aligning the multirotor with a target on the vessel, and a velocity feed-forward term which is estimated online by fusing vision and GPS velocity measurements. Special considerations are made to account for the presence of wind, and the approach is validated through full-scale outdoor hardware flight tests. The hardware system is composed entirely from off-the-shelf components that are commonly used in industry.