Toward Visual Autonomous Ship Board Landing of a VTOL UAV

In this paper we tackle the problem of landing a helicopter autonomously on a ship deck, using as the main sensor, an on-board colour camera. To create a test-bed, we first adequately simulate the movement of a ship landing platform on the Sea, for different Sea States, for different ships, randomly and realistically enough. We use a commercial parallel robot to get this movement. Once we had this, we developed an accurate and robust computer vision system to measure the pose of the helipad with respect to the on-board camera. To deal with the noise and the possible fails of the computer vision, a state estimator was created. With all of this, we are now able to develop and test a controller that closes the loop and finish the autonomous landing task.

The experiment CPLM (comportamiento de puentes líquidos en microgravedad) on board Minisat 01

The Universidad Politécnica de Madrid participates in the MINISAT 01 program as the experiment CPLM responsible. This experiment aims at the study of the fluid behaviour in reduced gravity conditions. The interest of this study is and has been widely recognised by the scientific community and has potential applications in the pharmaceutical and microelectronic technologies (crystal growth), among others. The scientific team which has developed the CPLM experiment has a wide experience in this field and had participate in the performance of a large number of experiments on the fluid behaviour in reduced gravity conditions in flight (Spacelab missions, TEXUS sounding rockets, KC-135 and Caravelle aeroplanes, drop towers, as well as on earth labs (neutralbuoyancy and small scale simulations). The experimental equipment used in CPLMis a version of the payload developed for experimentation on drop towers and on board microsatellites as the UPM-Sat 1, adapted to fly on board MINISAT 01.