A Novel Landing System to Increase Payload Capacity and Operational Availability of High Altitude Long Endurance UAVs

Unmanned stratospheric aircraft capable of staying aloft for long periods of time have become a topic of interest in the past years. Several problems are still to be solved to allow for a profitable commercial use of such aircraft. The inherent lightweight design leads to fragile structures with low payload capacities and a high wind sensitivity. The weather dependence significantly reduces the system's operational availability. To address these drawbacks a novel landing system is proposed in this paper. The landing gear can be removed from the aircraft and a ground-based mobile landing platform is introduced. The main technical challenges consist in the precise relative state estimation and cooperative control of the involved vehicles. A reliable simulation model of the overall system was developed and a number of simulation experiments performed before the actual landing was attempted with an experimental system setup. Multiple successful landing experiments demonstrate the validity of the proposed system.