Relative Navigation for the ‘In-Air Capturing’ of a Winged Reusable Launch Vehicle

In the ‘In-Air Capturing’ recovery mode, a winged rocket stage is captured mid-air by an aircraft and towed back to the launch site. A critical aspect of ‘In-Air Capturing’ involves a capturing device released from the towing aircraft, tasked with autonomously navigating to the launcher stage and connecting the vehicles with a tether. This operation demands high-precision close-range navigation techniques for the final docking maneuver. Hence, this paper proposes and studies different navigation solutions for the full-scale ‘In-Air Capturing’ application. A Vision-Based Navigation System (VisNav) is compared against the classical GPS/INS and a combined GPS/INS/VisNav navigation system. Simulations show that the GPS/INS/VisNav has a higher accuracy and provides a more robust navigation solution against model uncertainties and external disturbances.