Experimental Study of In-Flight Deployment of a Multicopter from a Fixed-Wing UAV

Abstract

This study reports the experimental results for the in-flight launch of a multicopter from a fixed-wing UAV for a potential cooperative mission. As the cruise conditions of a fixed-wing UAV are harsh for a small multicopter, this study proposes a guidance strategy for agile attitude re-initialisation. Moreover, restraint and deployment apparatus is devised for the fixed-wing UAV and the quadcopter. The performance of the proposed approach is verified through ground and flight experiments. During the flight tests, the multicopter was successfully deployed from the fixed-wing UAV in flight; the multicopter recovered its attitude and performed subsequent missions: waypoint navigation and automatic landing assuming a close support mission.