Cone-Sleeve-Based Vertically Stackable Multirotor UAV Swarm System for Vehicle-Mounted Launch and Landing

Abstract

To address the challenges of limited storage space and mobile launch-and-landing operations for vehicle-mounted multirotor UAV swarms, this paper proposes a stackable Cone-Sleeve UAV swarm system. The UAV airframe incorporates a through-body central sleeve integrated with conical guidance structures, which cooperate with a vertical guide rod mounted at the center of the mobile platform to achieve geometric passive pose correction during landing. In addition, a UWB-based onboard local positioning and navigation system is developed, in which a tightly coupled UWB/IMU estimator is employed to achieve high-precision relative state estimation for the UAV swarm. A five-stage finite state machine (FSM) schedules the landing sequence. During terminal landing, a motion feedforward control strategy is introduced for dynamic motion compensation and to ensure seamless state transitions. Simulation and vehicle-mounted experimental results demonstrate that, strictly under low-speed (≤0.5 m/s), constant-velocity straight-line motion conditions, the proposed system enables autonomous vertical takeoff and landing as well as rapid stacked launch-and-landing operations for multiple UAVs. The cooperative guidance strategy integrating active control and the Geometric Passive Guidance (GPG) mechanism improves the precision and speed of swarm landing operations. The proposed system provides a feasible system-level solution for the storage, transportation, and autonomous rapid launch-and-landing of high-density UAV swarms.