Multimodal Sensor-Gated Mid-Air Launch and Vision-Based Recovery of a Child UAV on a Hovering Mothership Drone

Key points

• This letter presents a mothership-child quadrotor system in which mission transitions are gated by complementary nonvisual sensing.1
• An upward-facing single-beam LiDAR on the recovery deck provides a binary occupancy state using hysteresis and a debounce interval derived from the child's occluding footprint and crossing speed; real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning conditions the carrier hover; and carrier thrust provides a proprioceptive indication of load transfer.1
• In ten outdoor missions using an F450-class mothership and a Q250-class child with camera-guided recovery, nine completed successfully while RTK-fixed positioning was maintained through release and capture.1
• A complementary MuJoCo study of fully autonomous fiducial-based recovery achieved touchdown 0.077 m from the deck center, while marker detection was lost within the final approximately 0.2 m above the docked configuration.1

Sources (1)

• [1]Multimodal Sensor-Gated Mid-Air Launch and Vision-Based Recovery of a Child UAV on a Hovering Mothership Drone
  arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 11, 04:23 PM

  Launching a micro unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) from a hovering carrier and recovering it in flight requires reliable confirmation that the child is securely seated before the carrier is allowed to descend.

  This letter presents a mothership-child quadrotor system in which mission transitions are gated by complementary nonvisual sensing.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.