Fully Automated Control System for Recovery of Fixed-wing UAV

Abstract

Safe released and recovery is a key point for fixed-wing UAV shipborne application in the deep sea. However, most of the current ways of release and recovery depend on people’s assistance, which limits the efficiency of the UAV application, especially for the swarm application. Focusing on this problem, a fully automated shipborne released and recovery system is proposed for recycling deployment of fixed-wing UAV in this paper. An active flexible arresting system is first designed to compensate the roll-pitch swing of the USV deck, at the same time to track the altitude of the UAV for improving the success rate of recovery. Besides that, combined robotic arm and catapult a release system is designed to achieve fully automated release of the UAV. Experiments under different conditions are conducted to analyze the performance and verify the feasibility of the proposed system.