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Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica ›› 2025, Vol. 46 ›› Issue (12): 231448.doi: 10.7527/S1000-6893.2024.31448

• Solid Mechanics and Vehicle Conceptual Design • Previous Articles    

DQN-based active arrest and recovery technique for UAVs

Yifeng WANG1,2, Yiming PENG1,2(), Long LI1,2, Xiaohui WEI1,2, Hong NIE1,2   

  1. 1.State Key Laboratory of Mechanics and Control for Aerospace Structures,Nanjing University of Aeronautica and Astronautics,Nanjing 210016,China
    2.Key Laboratory of Fundamental Science for National Defense-Advanced Design Technology of Flight Vehicle,Nanjing University of Aeronautica and Astronautics,Nanjing 210016,China
  • Received:2024-10-28 Revised:2024-11-11 Accepted:2024-12-03 Online:2024-12-11 Published:2024-12-10
  • Contact: Yiming PENG E-mail:yimingpeng@nuaa.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province(BK20220910);National Natural Science Foundation of China(52202441);National Defense Outstanding Youth Science Foundation(2018-JCJQ-ZQ-053);Aeronautical Science Foundation of China(20240013052003)

Abstract:

The success rate of hooking the cable is one of the key indicators of safety and reliability when recovering a UAV using arresting cables. To address the challenge of improving the success rate with restricted UAV recovery areas provided by vehicle-mounted mobile platform, this paper proposes an active cable engagement method for UAV arresting and recovery. The method enhances the success rate by having the arresting system actively move to the optimal cable engagement position under the guidance of AI computation results. First, a UAV landing and recovery dynamics model is established to calculate the cable engagement failure boundary. The Support Vector Machine (SVM) method is applied to identify the dynamics simulation results and generate a proxy model for UAV cable engagement analysis. Then, the cable-moving process is simplified into a Markov decision process. Using the cable-moving device model as the training environment, a six-degree-of-freedom UAV landing and descent model is employed to generate the dataset, and the cable engagement analysis proxy model is used as the reward function. A Deep Q-Network (DQN) is applied to train a cable-moving strategy that dynamically computes and guides the arresting system to adjust to the optimal engagement position in real time. Simulation results show that with limited recovery space, the proposed method improves the success rate by 29% compared to the traditional passive recovery method. This approach significantly enhances the safety and reliability of UAV landing and recovery, providing new theoretical support and practical solutions for the development of intelligent recovery technology.

Key words: fixed-wing UAV, landing recovery, success rate of hooking cable, deep Q-network (DQN), artificial intelligence (AI)

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