A Tethered Aerial Recovery System for UAV Landing on USV

This paper presents a novel tethered recovery system designed for a UAV landing on a USV. The system comprises an aerial platform, a winch, and a tether connecting the two components. During the recovery process, the UAV initially docks and locks to the aerial platform. Subsequently, the winch recovers both the aerial platform and the UAV by retracting the tether. The advantage of this system is its ability to maintain stability for the aerial platform, even in the presence of significant disturbance experienced by the USV, thanks to the tether's capability to mitigate the impact between them. The paper elaborates on the design of a docking mechanism for the aerial platform and the UAV, and proposes a automatic docking controller based on cascaded PID, which achieves position calibration by outputing attitude angles to the flight control system(FCS). Finally, outdoor experiments were conducted to validate the system's feasibility for UAV recovery.