Automatic Carrier Landing Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on Preview Control

For carrier-based unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs),one of the important problems is the design of an automatic carrier landing system(ACLS)that would enable the UAVs to accomplish autolanding on the aircraft carrier.However,due to the movements of the flight deck with six degree-of-freedom,the autolanding becomes sophisticated.To solve this problem,an accurate and effective ACLS is developed,which is composed of an optimal preview control based flight control system and a Kalman filter based deck motion predictor.The preview control fuses the future information of the reference glide slope to improve landing precision.The reference glide slope is normally a straight line.However,the deck motion will change the position of the ideal landing point,and tracking the ideal straight glide slope may cause landing failure.Therefore,the predictive deck motion information from the deck motion predictor is used to correct the reference glide slope,which decreases the dispersion around the desired landing point.Finally,simulations are carried out to verify the performance of the designed ACLS based on a nonlinear UAV model.

Guidance and Control Techniques of Carrier-Based Aircraft for Automatic Carrier Landing

We summarize the guidance and control techniques of automatic carrier landing for carrier-based aircraft.First,we analyze the carrier landing operations of the manned fixed-wing aircraft,unmanned fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters.Second,we look into the navigation and guidance system and the flight control methods for current different aircraft.Finally,we draw several conclusions of the development prospects for aircraft carrier landing,including the precision landing control techniques,precision approach and landing guidance techniques,and adaptive,reconfigurable and intelligent flight control techniques.

H_∞ Preview Control for Automatic Carrier Landing

This paper focuses on the application of H_∞preview control in automatic carrier landing system(ACLS)for carrier-based aircraft.Due to the mutual movement between aircraft and carrier,the landing process becomes considerably more challenging compared to a conventional runway landing.ACLS systems mitigate this by predicting deck motion and generating ideal glide slope path for tracking.Although,this predicted glide slope information is available in advance,conventional control structures are still unable to use this future information.H_∞preview control has the ability to utilize this future information for improving tracking response and disturbance rejection.The process of incorporating preview information into ACLS framework and synthesizing the H_∞preview controller is presented.The methodology is verified using the example of F/A-18 automatic carrier landing problem and results are presented.