Semi-automatic Collection of Marine Debris by Collaborating UAV and UUV

Abstract

In recent years, floating debris on the sea damages the environment and wildlife. The current solution to this problem is manually collecting by ships or divers, but this is inefficient and time-consuming. For an efficient collection of marine debris, we propose a semi-autonomous collection system by collaborating an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV). Since the field of view of a UUV is very limited, a UAV widely surveys the debris from birds-eye-view. The view from the UAV is provided to the user and the user designates the target debris on the view. By converting the position on the view to it in UUV coordinates, the UUV collects debris automatically. We tested the proposed system using a dynamics simulator and real robots to evaluate the effectiveness of the collaborativesystem. Videos are available at https://naoki-sh.github.io/uuv_project/home.