Net recovery of UAV with single-frequency RTK GPS

A system for autonomous precision recovery of fixedwing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using low-cost GPS L1 C/A based RTK (Real-Time Kinematic) solution utilizing locally generated corrections is described and field tested. We present a system architecture which includes the setup of the hardware and software for the onboard GPS receiver, base-station, differential link, computers running open-source carrier-phase positioning software, roll-stabilized GPS-antenna, dedicated flight control algorithms for the final approach, and their integration with the ArduPilot open-source autopilot in the small X8 UAV (flying-wing). Experimental results show proof-of-concept field tests where the prototype implementation has been used for recovery in a stationary recovery net.