Vision-Based Agile Landing on Turbulent Waters

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Angelis, Dimosthenis, Bauersfeld, Leonard, Scaramuzza, Davide, Boukas, Evangelos
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Angelis, Dimosthenis
Bauersfeld, Leonard
Scaramuzza, Davide
Boukas, Evangelos
author_facet Angelis, Dimosthenis
Bauersfeld, Leonard
Scaramuzza, Davide
Boukas, Evangelos
contents Autonomous landing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles on maritime vessels is challenging due to the coupled motion of the vehicle and landing platform in open-sea conditions. This paper presents a reinforcement-learning-based approach for autonomous multirotor landing on moving maritime platforms without requiring explicit platform-state information. The proposed method uses multirotor state measurements together with local visual features, consisting of keypoints and associated descriptors extracted from the landing surface, to predict attitude and thrust commands. These commands are tracked by a conventional low-level controller. The policy is trained in simulation using synthetic keypoints with randomly generated normalized descriptors, enabling zero-shot deployment with different local feature extractors onboard the UAV. We evaluate the method in a realistic simulator and show that it outperforms a state-of-the-art Model Predictive Control baseline under platform motions corresponding to ``Very Rough'' sea conditions. Finally, we perform extensive real-world experiments, demonstrating autonomous onboard landing using two different local feature extractors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach for agile multirotor landing on maritime platforms in turbulent waters that does not rely on an explicit platform-state representation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_23717
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Vision-Based Agile Landing on Turbulent Waters
Angelis, Dimosthenis
Bauersfeld, Leonard
Scaramuzza, Davide
Boukas, Evangelos
Robotics
Autonomous landing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles on maritime vessels is challenging due to the coupled motion of the vehicle and landing platform in open-sea conditions. This paper presents a reinforcement-learning-based approach for autonomous multirotor landing on moving maritime platforms without requiring explicit platform-state information. The proposed method uses multirotor state measurements together with local visual features, consisting of keypoints and associated descriptors extracted from the landing surface, to predict attitude and thrust commands. These commands are tracked by a conventional low-level controller. The policy is trained in simulation using synthetic keypoints with randomly generated normalized descriptors, enabling zero-shot deployment with different local feature extractors onboard the UAV. We evaluate the method in a realistic simulator and show that it outperforms a state-of-the-art Model Predictive Control baseline under platform motions corresponding to ``Very Rough'' sea conditions. Finally, we perform extensive real-world experiments, demonstrating autonomous onboard landing using two different local feature extractors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach for agile multirotor landing on maritime platforms in turbulent waters that does not rely on an explicit platform-state representation.
title Vision-Based Agile Landing on Turbulent Waters
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23717