Research of key technologies for multi‐rotor UAV automatic aerial recovery system

Abstract

Abstract This study proposes an aerial recovery technology that can complete aerial recovery for target unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by a platform UAV to overcome the limitation of ground recovery for multi‐rotor UAVs. To ensure the safety of automatic aerial recovery, more requirements are made for the stability of multi‐rotor UAVs. This study proposes a back‐stepping trajectory tracking controller for feedforward compensation of uncertain disturbances. The results of the simulation show that the controller can effectively prevent external disturbance and meet requirements for the desired trajectory tracking. Furthermore, based on a you only look once (YOLO) network, this study designs a real‐time image recognition and positioning system, which can achieve real‐time positioning for platform UAV by the target UAV with an image‐processing rate of 8 frames per second (FPS). With the main objective of safety, this study designs an automatic recovery guiding system for target UAVs using a fuzzy controller. The target UAVs can automatically realize a soft landing on the platform UAV effect of the guiding system. Finally, this study conducts dynamic recovery tests in‐flight and verifies the feasibility of automatic aerial recovery technology for multi‐rotor UAVs.