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A Novel Landing System to Increase Payload Capacity and Operational Availability of High Altitude Long Endurance UAVs

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Abstract

Unmanned stratospheric aircraft capable of staying aloft for long periods of time have become a topic of interest in the past years. Several problems are still to be solved to allow for a profitable commercial use of such aircraft. The inherent lightweight design leads to fragile structures with low payload capacities and a high wind sensitivity. The weather dependence significantly reduces the system’s operational availability. To address these drawbacks a novel landing system is proposed in this paper. The landing gear can be removed from the aircraft and a ground-based mobile landing platform is introduced. The main technical challenges consist in the precise relative state estimation and cooperative control of the involved vehicles. A reliable simulation model of the overall system was developed and a number of simulation experiments performed before the actual landing was attempted with an experimental system setup. Multiple successful landing experiments demonstrate the validity of the proposed system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. German Aerospace Center DLR, Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, Muenchener Str. 20, 802234, Wessling, Germany

    Tin Muskardin, Georg Balmer, Sven Wlach, Maximilian Laiacker & Konstantin Kondak

  2. KTH Stockholm, Department of Automatic Control, Osquldas väg 10, SE-100 44, 11428, Stockholm, Sweden

    Linnea Persson

  3. University of Seville, ETS Ingenieria, Camino Descubrimientos s/n, 41092, Sevilla, Spain

    Anibal Ollero

Authors
  1. Tin Muskardin
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  2. Georg Balmer
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  3. Linnea Persson
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  4. Sven Wlach
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  5. Maximilian Laiacker
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  6. Anibal Ollero
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  7. Konstantin Kondak
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tin Muskardin.

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Muskardin, T., Balmer, G., Persson, L. et al. A Novel Landing System to Increase Payload Capacity and Operational Availability of High Altitude Long Endurance UAVs. J Intell Robot Syst 88, 597–618 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-017-0475-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-017-0475-z

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