Uncrewed marine vehicle recovery: present technologies and future challenges

Uncrewed marine vehicles (UMVs) are essential platforms for marine science, offshore engineering, and defense applications. This review provides a comprehensive overview of UMV recovery technologies including surface and subsea recovery, with particular emphasis on the evolution from single-mode recovery towards integrated surface-subsea recovery. The recovery process is broadly divided into the approaching, engagement phase, and recovery completion phases. The corresponding key technologies, including path planning, obstacle avoidance, acoustic-based guidance, vision-based guidance, capture-based guidance, motion control, and motion compensation, are reviewed in detail, along with emerging development trends. In addition to sea–sea domain recovery, this review highlights air–sea domain recovery as an emerging cross-domain research area extending beyond traditional UMV recovery, which has received very limited systematic attention in the existing literature.