Design and experiment of a sea-air heterogeneous unmanned collaborative system for rapid inspection tasks at sea

The incorporation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) into sea surface inspection and complex water navigation tasks performed by Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) enhances the operational capabilities and task efficiency of heterogeneous systems. The autonomous docking of USV by UAV at sea serves as a foundational and vital element for facilitating collaborative tasks among unmanned systems. Faced with the problem that the UAV visual positioning USV deck is susceptible to interference from maritime meteorological conditions and the positioning accuracy of GPS is poor, this paper introduces the UWB positioning system and analyzes and solves the error disturbance term of its positioning array under the influence of sea sway for the first time. At the same time, due to the error problem caused by the small baseline of UWB installed on the deck, an adaptive Kalman filter that combines GPS speed information and UWB positioning data is proposed to reduce error. In light of the destabilizing effects resulting from the swaying of the USV deck during UAV docking, this study proposes a USV roll and pitch stability control strategy that incorporates environmental wind and wave data. Additionally, a UAV docking controller utilizing a fuzzy PID approach has been developed to facilitate secure and stable UAV takeoff and docking operations at sea. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm was verified through sea docking experiments under various working conditions. Finally, in the context of the multi-target maritime inspection mission of heterogeneous unmanned systems, an exploratory improved VRP algorithm is proposed, allowing UAVs to quickly and efficiently complete sea surface inspection operations.The feasibility and operational efficiency of the cooperative mission system are tested through joint simulation using Simulink and UE4 in a high-fidelity environment. This provides a reference solution for future applications of heterogeneous unmanned systems in real maritime environments.