An Ultralight Launch-and-Recovery System for Tethered Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles on Small Unmanned Ground...

Area of Science:

• Robotics and Autonomous Systems
• Aerospace Engineering
• Mechatronics

Background:

• Heterogeneous unmanned ground vehicle-unmanned aerial vehicle (UGV-UAV) systems enhance field exploration.
• Tethered unmanned aerial vehicles (TUAVs) extend mission capabilities but face compatibility issues with small UGVs due to heavy ground stations.
• Tilted ground stations complicate UAV launch and recovery operations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an ultralight, vehicle-mounted tethered ground station for micro unmanned aerial vehicles (micro-UAVs) compatible with small unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs).
• To enable practical tether-assisted recovery for micro-UAVs on unstructured terrain without visual fiducials.
• To establish a lightweight, low-cost hardware design and a viable recovery strategy for multimodal micro air-ground robotic systems.

Main Methods:

• Co-design of a 2-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) self-leveling launch platform and a passive tether-assisted recovery scheme.
• Integration of a customized UAV flight-control loop with the ground tether-management system.
• Experimental validation of the system's weight, self-leveling capability, and recovery performance.

Main Results:

• The complete platform weighs only 4.1 kg.
• The self-leveling mechanism compensates for ground inclinations up to 24 degrees.
• Demonstrated feasibility and tolerance of passive-landing tests, confirming practical tether-assisted recovery without visual fiducials.

Conclusions:

• The developed system provides a lightweight and low-cost solution for tethered micro-UAV operations with UGVs.
• The passive tether-assisted recovery scheme is practically viable for multimodal micro air-ground robotic systems.
• The system architecture supports simplified exploratory simulations for tether-based ground-anchor localization.