An Autonomous Fixed-Wing UAV Shipboard Recovery System

Among the many autonomous guidance and control challenges facing DoD and industry today is the safe, reliable shipboard recovery of fixed wing UAVs. Leveraging our autonomous landing research conducted for the Air Force Research Laboratory and NAVSEA, Geneva Aerospace proposes an autonomous shipboard recovery solution using a hybrid control system structure that combines trajectory synthesis guidance with line-of-sight rate guidance to provide precision control to recovery using an integrated GPS aided relative navigation solution. Employing the principals of terminal homing guidance, the design is ideally suited to facilitate recovery on a moving ship deck. The concept will take advantage of the precision positioning offered by the relative navigation solution and precision path regulation offered by the hybrid control system to enable recovery on very small deck platforms. We will demonstrate that the recent technology advances in miniaturized GPS receivers, micro-electromechanical sensors (MEMS), spread-spectrum communications transceivers, and single-board computers all combine to offer a small, light-weight, reliable and affordable hardware architecture to address the shipboard recovery problem. When integrated with the proposed guidance, navigation, and control software, this hardware architecture will provide an excellent integrated system solution with a very small logistics footprint.