Overview of a planned flight test operation for a scaled in-air capturing demonstration

Abstract

Current aerospace research seeks to realize reusable launch vehicle (RLV) missions. One conceptual idea is to capture a returning booster stage in air with another aircraft as proposed by DLR in previous work. Within the H2020 project - Formation flight for in-Air Launcher 1st stage Capturing demonstration (FALCon), we investigate the in-air-capturing (IAC) approach with a demonstration setup of scaled unmanned aerial vehicles to research different aspects of this approach in scaled flight tests. This paper provides an overview of the unmanned IAC demonstrators and the planned experiment setup of the FALCon project, which will be validated in future flight test demonstrations. We describe the details of three flight demonstrators for the reusable launch vehicle, capturing or towing aircraft, and an intelligent coupling device which we developed from scratch for this project. We focus on the safety aspects enabling the implementation of a safe and successful demonstration in a non-segregated European airspace and present our researched aspects of the IAC maneuver. The planned formation requires a relative pose estimation between the involved demonstrators, while the demonstrators perform a rapid unpowered descent. We use an environmental perception setup, based on camera and LiDAR data processing, to solve this challenging task.