We excited to share that our research paper, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Landing on Maritime Vessels using Signal Prediction of the Ship Motion, has been accepted for a technical presentation at the OCEANS 2018 Charleston Conference October 22 – 25, 2018! Following the conference, our research will also be published alongside some of the best-known scientists and technologists in the world.

This event is packed full of engaging presentations from leading professionals, cutting-edge research, new technology demonstrations, interactive events and activities, and more. Some of the highlights of the event include telecasting live from a NASA spaceship, offering tours of the historic Hunley, and hearing from renowned researchers and scientists.

We would love for you to join us at the conference from October 22 – 25. Feel free to ask us any questions you have, and for more info on the conference, visit their website.

Shadi Abujoub will be presenting and below are the details of his talk

Session: 3.1.2 Automatic Control
Day: Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Time: 3:40 PM – 5:00 PM
Room: Room 6
Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming more prevalent in maritime operations. For safe operation, one of the key challenges of using UAVs at sea is the relative motion that exists between the UAV and ship. For perpetual maritime operations, UAV systems need to be able to land safely on ocean vessels. Determining a ‘quiescent period’, where the roll and pitch angles of the ship are below a danger threshold, is a challenging problem for UAV systems. In general, current strategies rely on reactive systems and often use sensors on board the maritime vessel. The scope of the current paper is a proof-of-concept methodology which uses a signal prediction algorithm to facilitate safer autonomous UAV-ship landings. This study uses laser ranging and detecting devices (LIDAR) in conjunction with a signal prediction algorithm (SPA) to forecast when the ship motion is within safe landing limits. ShipMo3D was used to generate twelve trial cases for UAV-ship landings on a 33 m ship. The results show that with the use of the SPA, the number of UAV landing attempts was decreased by an average of 2 attempts, per test case, when compared to a system that did not use an SPA. Moreover, the results indicate that with revised tuning of the SPA, the likelihood of a safe landing can be further improved.