Electronics and Electrical Engineering and Control

Coordinating motion planning for towed cable system in UAV aerial recovery with unmatched envelope

  • Zikang SU ,
  • Haitong CHEN ,
  • Chuntao LI ,
  • Zhuolin XING ,
  • Honglun WANG
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  • 1.College of Automation Engineering,Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics,Nanjing 210016,China
    2.School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering,Beihang University,Beijing 100191,China
E-mail: lct115@nuaa.edu.cn

Received date: 2022-05-05

  Revised date: 2022-05-30

  Accepted date: 2022-06-16

  Online published: 2022-06-24

Supported by

National Natural Science Foundation of China(61903190);Aeronautical Science Foundation of China(2019ZA052006);Foundation of Science and Technology on UAV Laboratory(2022-JCJQ-LB-071);Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China(BK20190401);China Postdoctoral Science Foundation(2020M681588)

Abstract

This paper proposes a motion planning method that coordinates mothership movement and cable winch control to stabilize the drogue of the towed cable system during fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) aerial recovery with unmatched envelope. A multi-link cable-drogue and mothership dynamics model under the airflow disturbances was first established. Two optimal drogue trajectory control problems subject to the physical limits of the mothership and cable were then formulated, considering dynamic constraints of the towed cable and mothership. Next, the hp adaptive Radau pseudospectral method was employed to convert the optimal trajectory control problems into nonlinear programming problems which were then solved by the nonlinear programming solver software SNOPT. Finally, three typical scenarios including mothership motion planning under a quiet atmosphere and constant wind, and coordinating motion planning of mothership movement and cable winch under constant wind were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Numerical results show that the proposed method can well control the drogue trajectory subject to physical limits and wind disturbances.

Cite this article

Zikang SU , Haitong CHEN , Chuntao LI , Zhuolin XING , Honglun WANG . Coordinating motion planning for towed cable system in UAV aerial recovery with unmatched envelope[J]. ACTA AERONAUTICAET ASTRONAUTICA SINICA, 2023 , 44(10) : 327377 -327377 . DOI: 10.7527/S1000-6893.2022.27377

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