LIDAR-based USV close approach to vessels for manipulation purposes

Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) are used in a variety of applications today. They can also be used in multi-robot systems together with Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). These systems can be very useful in maritime security scenarios. In this paper, we present a USV LIDAR-based navigation in GNSS-denied scenarios. The scenario is one of the tasks of the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC). Specifically, the goal is to approach closely a vessel so that UAVs can bring small objects to the USV and a robotic arm mounted on the USV can carry large objects. Simulation results based on the official MBZIRC simulator are presented, showing the effectiveness of the approach.