AUSLUN: A Fixed-Hover UAV--USV System for GNSS-Denied Maritime Search and Navigation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29875v1
• Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2026 07:15:59 GMT
• Title: AUSLUN: A Fixed-Hover UAV--USV System for GNSS-Denied Maritime Search and Navigation
• Abstract summary: Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) denial can prevent an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) from both finding a distant vessel and maintaining a globally referenced approach.<n>This paper presents AUSLUN, a fixed-hover aerial-surface system that uses a coastal unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a long-range sensing and navigation anchor.<n>Results establish the feasibility and operating boundary of fixed-hover UAV assistance for stationary-target approach in coastal-denied environments.
• Score: 7.220023631779745
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) denial can prevent an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) from both finding a distant vessel and maintaining a globally referenced approach. This paper presents AUSLUN (Automatic UAV Search, Localization, and USV Navigation), a fixed-hover aerial-surface system that uses a coastal unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which estimates its own pose through visual-inertial odometry (VIO), as a long-range sensing and navigation anchor. The central design shifts sensing motion from UAV translation to a zoom pod and closes the loop through three coupled elements: polygon-aware annular pod scanning, modality-aware bearing-range localization, and target-relative USV guidance with visual-loss recovery. The same gated recursive estimator uses laser range for the non-cooperative target and datalink range for the cooperative USV. Search-planning simulations show that the adaptive yaw bounds reduce scan time and redundant coverage relative to a matched fixed-sector scan, and GPS-referenced field data show that the gated recursive estimator outperforms non-recursive baselines in localization accuracy. An integrated maritime mission further demonstrates the complete search-to-navigation sequence, including a deliberately triggered visual-loss recovery. These results establish the feasibility and operating boundary of fixed-hover UAV assistance for stationary-target approach in coastal GNSS-denied environments. The source code and a video demonstration are publicly available at https://github.com/xirhxq/pod_search and https://youtu.be/S-5RkJs35JI.

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