Visual SLAM for Autonomous Drone Landing on a Maritime Platform

Ship deck landing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs/drones) in different kinds of environmental conditions remains a bottleneck for the widespread deployment of UAVs for maritime operations. For safe operation, the relative motion between the UAV and the pitching and rolling deck of a moving ship must be estimated accurately and in real-time. This paper presents a visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) method for real-time motion estimation of the UAV with respect to its confined landing area on a maritime platform during landing phase. The visual SLAM algorithm ORB-SLAM3 [1] was selected after benchmarking with multiple state-of-the-art visual SLAM and Visual Odometry (VO) algorithms with the EuRoC dataset [2]. It was evaluated for a simulated landing scenario of a UAV at 16m height with a downward camera in multiple configurations with sufficient results in both speed and accuracy for the landing task.