Theoretical and Experimental Study of Adaptive Control for Fixed-wing UAV Arrested Recovery on the USV

Shipborne recovery of small mixed-wing UAV is an important technology for UAV application in the sea, which have attracted much attention of researchers in recent years. Arrested recovery with arresting cable is one kind of effective recovery method of fixed-wing UAV. However, due to the severe limited recovery area, precision control of UAV is a key problem of UAV recovery and less tested work in the real surface environment are conducted. In our work, an adaptive control method combined with LPV model and
$\alpha -\beta$
filter for fixed-wing UAV arrested recovery on the USV is first proposed to achieve robust and high precision of the UAV during the recovery. Moreover, based on the independent shipborne recovery system and fixed-wing UAV, many flight experiments under different conditions in real environment are designed and conducted to verify the feasibility and performance of the system and methods. The results indicate that the UAV with the proposed method can satisfy the requirements of arrested recovery on the USV.