Autonomous recovery of a fixed-wing UAV using a net suspended by two multirotor UAVs

Abstract

This article presents a novel recovery method for fixed‐wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), aimed at enabling operations from marine vessels. Instead of using the conventional method of using a fixed net on the ship deck, we propose to suspend a net under two cooperative multirotor UAVs. While keeping their relative formation, the multirotor UAVs are able to intercept the incoming fixed‐wing UAV along a virtual runway over the sea and transport it back to the ship. In addition to discussing the concept and design a control system, this paper also presents experimental validation of the proposed concept for a small‐scale UAV platform.