Autonomous Drone Performance During Maritime Integration for Gust Response: Lab Experiment

The United States Navy has emphasized a strategic shift toward increased the deployment of autonomy in uncrewed aerial systems (UASs), with particular interest in vision-based precision landing on underway naval vessels. This capability is especially challenging due to the requirement for stable trajectory movement in highly dynamic maritime environments characterized by deck motion, turbulent airflow, and the unreliability of external navigation aids such as GPS and RF-based signals in contested settings. To address these challenges, this work presents a laboratory-scale experimental framework for developing and evaluating autonomous shipboard landing systems using only onboard sensing. Our first contribution is the design of a controlled wind-disturbance testbed capable of producing spatially and temporally varying airflow representative of ship-deck aerodynamics. Second, we implement a baseline autonomous precision landing controller that enables a baseline comparison under these perturbations using onboard perception and inertial sensing alone. Third, we report an experimental data-collection and evaluation pipeline that supports quantitative assessment of landing performance across disturbance conditions. Together, these contributions establish a foundational intermediate validation platform for iterative development and benchmarking of maritime UAS recovery systems, bridging the gap between simulation and full-scale deployment on active naval vessels.