Towards Aerial Recovery of Parachute-Deployed Payloads

Sensor payloads suspended from parachutes are often used in atmospheric profiling applications. They drift freely and often end up landing in inaccessible regions that make their retrieval challenging or impossible. In this paper, we develop and evaluate an approach using a multirotor unmanned aerial system to autonomously retrieve the parachute while it is still in the air. The system relies only on the initial conditions of the parachute-payload system and feedback from the vehicle's onboard cameras to track and then intercept the parachute mid-air in under 40 seconds on average. We present the results from our field experiments where we demonstrate the feasibility of the system and discuss its applicability to long-term payload transportation systems.