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

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 smallscale UAV platform.

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