MORUS

The main goal of MORUS project is a design and development of a fully operational complex robotic system prototype comprised of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) capable of autonomous and cooperative mission executions related to environmental, border and port security.

The proposed research is in internationally competitive field with the main objective to design and develop
autonomous aerial and marine robotic system, capable of collective engagement in missions taking place in dynamic and nondeterministic environments.

The design will focus mainly on payload enhancement and UAV autonomy which is mandatory for UUV
transport. Besides that, a docking system and cooperative control algorithms will be developed enabling
autonomous deployment, re-deployment and data exchange at the open sea. Operating environment of the proposed prototype is an unknown, uncertain and remote, i.e. far from a human operator. Therefore, a whole set of novel cooperative control algorithms, combined with augmented human machine interface, will be designed and implemented in order to ensure safety and recoverability of the described system. Having said that, objectives of the MORUS project are summarised as follows:

1. Design and construction of an UAV with docking and transportation mechanism,
2. Visual feedback based docking and gripping algorithm,
3. Design of augmented and easy to operate human machine interface for simultaneous control of aerial
and marine robots,
4. Enhancement of the autonomous navigation capabilities and operational supportability in remote
locations with few or no local support.
5. Agile UUV redeployment through cooperation with an UAV,
6. Enable data exchange between the UUV and UAV through cooperative control and estimation.