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arXiv · 2502.21303

CurviTrack: Curvilinear Trajectory Tracking for High-speed Chase of a USV

Parakh M. Gupta·Ondřej Procházka·Tiago Nascimento·Martin Saska
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Abstract

Heterogeneous robot teams used in marine environments incur time-and-energy penalties when the marine vehicle has to halt the mission to allow the autonomous aerial vehicle to land for recharging. In this paper, we present a solution for this problem using a novel drag-aware model formulation which is coupled with MPC, and therefore, enables tracking and landing during high-speed curvilinear trajectories of an USV without any communication. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our approach yields 40% decrease in prediction errors, and provides a 3-fold increase in certainty of predictions. Consequently, this leads to a 30% improvement in tracking performance and 40% higher success in landing on a moving USV even during aggressive turns that are unfeasible for conventional marine missions. We test our approach in two different real-world scenarios with marine vessels of two different sizes and further solidify our results through statistical analysis in simulation to demonstrate the robustness of our method.

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Parakh M. Gupta, Ondřej Procházka, Tiago Nascimento, Martin Saska. 2025-02-28. CurviTrack: Curvilinear Trajectory Tracking for High-speed Chase of a USV. https://doi.org/10.1109/lra.2025.3546079

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