Assessment of Meteorological Threats to the Coordinated Search and Rescue of Unmanned/Manned Aircraft

The architecture and working principle of coordinated search and rescue system of unmanned/manned aircraft,which is composed of manned/unmanned aircraft and manned aircraft,were first introduced,and they can cooperate with each other to complete a search and rescue task.Secondly,a threat assessment method based on meteorological data was proposed,and potential meteorological threats,such as storms and rainfall,can be predicted by collecting and analyzing meteorological data.Finally,an experiment was carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in different scenarios.The experimental results show that the coordinated search and rescue system of unmanned/manned aircraft can be used to effectively assess meteorological threats and provide accurate search and rescue guidance.

Parameter Optimization of Nose Landing Gear Considering Both Take-off and Landing Performance of Catapult Take-off Carrier-Based Aircraft

Optimization of the parameters of landing gear systems with double-stage air springs of catapult take-off carrier-based aircraft is here studied based on the mathematical equations of the classic dual mass spring-damper dynamic model.Certain standards for both take-off and landing performance are put forward.The contradictory factors between take-off and landing processes are analyzed.The optimization of oil in the pin area and the area near the rear oil hole is performed.Then these optimized parameters are used to assess the influence of the initial pressure of the low chamber,the ratio of the high chamber to the low chamber,and the tire inflation pressure on the performance of arresting landing and catapult take-off.The influences of these parameters on carrier-based aircraft and the aircraft-carrier on aircraft catapult take-off is also assessed.Based on the results of the simulation,respective take-off criteria must be drafted considering different types of aircraft and different take-off load cases,all of which must be matched to parameters relevant to catapult take-off.

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.

Dynamics Analysis of Carrier-Based Aircraft with Off-Center Catapult Launch

In order to enhance the safety of the catapult launch of the carrier-based aircraft,the catapult launch multibody dynamic model is established aiming at the problem of off center catapult launch.The whole catapult process including four stages which are buffering,tensioning,releasing and taxiing is taken into consideration and the body dynamics of the off-center catapult during each stage is analyzed.The catapult launch dynamic differences between the conditions only considering taxiing and that considering four stages are compared,and the effects of the different initial off center distances considering four stages on the attitude,landing gear load and acceleration of the carrier based aircraft during catapult launch are discussed.The results show that only considering taxiing may underestimate the dynamics of the carrier-based aircraft substantially.When taking four stages into consideration,the initial off-center distance has small influence on the aircraft dynamic characteristics during buffering and tensioning but has larger influence on that during releasing and taxiing.The increase of the off-center distance will cause the enhancement of the aircraft rolling and yawing,which may lead to the load difference between the left and right landing gears and the increase of the aircraft lateral acceleration.The establishment and simulation of the catapult launch multi body dynamic model founded on buffering,tensioning,releasing and taxiing provide reference for the carrier-based aircraft design and analysis of the catapult launch dynamics.

Optimal Preview Control for Automatic Carrier Landing System of Carrier-Based Aircraft with Air Wake

Carrier-based aircraft carrier landing is a special kind of tracking control problem and not suitable for classical control methods,which may miss the desired performance or result in overdesign.Therefore,we present an optimal preview control for automatic carrier landing system(ACLS)by using state information of system,as well as future reference information,which can avoid the shortcomings of classical control methods.Since the flight performance of carrier-based aircraft is disturbed by air wake when the aircraft flies near the area of carrier stern,we design a disturbance rejection strategy to ensure that aircraft track the glide path with high precision and robustness.Further,carrier-based aircraft is a complex nonlinear system.However,the nonlinear model of carrier-based aircraft can be linearized at equilibrium landing state and decoupled into the longitudinal model and the lateral model.Therefore,an optimal preview control system is designed.The simulation results of a carrier-based aircraft show that the optimal preview control system can effectively suppress air wake.Tracking accuracy of optimal preview controller is higher than that of the proportional integral differential(PID)control system.

Simulation Analysis of Electromechanical Coupling for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Cabin Door System

In order to study the dynamic response of the unmanned aerial vehicle cabin door opening and closing system under impact load conditions, considering the flexible treatment of mechanical components, and the system’s motion with different stiffness of energy-absorbing components, a rigid-flexible coupling model of the cabin door actuation system was established in LMS. Virtual. Motion. In Amesim, a control model of the motor was created. Through the Motion-Amesim co-simulation module, the dynamic module of the system was combined with the motor control module to complete the electromechanical coupling simulation and analyze the results. .

Isopropanol as Fuel for Small Unmanned Aircraft

Gasoline engines are increasingly popular for use in small unmanned aircraft requiring endurance due to the specific energy of gasoline (47.3 MJ·kg-1) and its cost effectiveness. However, gasoline is volatile and it poses a health hazard. In this work, isopropanol is proposed and investigated as viable fuel for small gasoline engines. Isooctane is used as a benchmark for performance comparison. The field testing reveals that isopropanol offers similar running performance and ease of starting. The maximum output power of isopropanol is surprisingly found to occur at a more advanced ignition timing compared with isooctane. The significant outcome of this study is that isopropanol can readily be used as a replacement fuel for existing engines without the need for any modifications to the ignition module or the engine itself.

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.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles:Control Methods and Future Challenges

With the rapid development of computer technology,automatic control technology and communication technology,research on unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)has attracted extensive attention from all over the world during the last decades.Particularly due to the demand of various civil applications,the conceptual design of UAV and autonomous flight control technology have been promoted and developed mutually.This paper is devoted to providing a brief review of the UAV control issues,including motion equations,various classical and advanced control approaches.The basic ideas,applicable conditions,advantages and disadvantages of these control approaches are illustrated and discussed.Some challenging topics and future research directions are raised.

A bi-population immune algorithm for weapon transportation support scheduling problem with pickup and delivery on aircraft carrier deck

The weapon transportation support scheduling problem on aircraft carrier deck is the key to restricting the sortie rate and combat capability of carrier-based aircraft.This paper studies the problem and presents a novel solution architecture.Taking the interference of the carrier-based aircraft deck layout on the weapon transportation route and precedence constraint into consideration,a mixed integer formulation is established to minimize the total objective,which is constituted of makespan,load variance and accumulative transfer time of support unit.Solution approach is developed for the model.Firstly,based on modeling the carrier aircraft parked on deck as convex obstacles,the path library of weapon transportation is constructed through visibility graph and Warshall-Floyd methods.We then propose a bi-population immune algorithm in which a population-based forward/backward scheduling technique,local search schemes and a chaotic catastrophe operator are embedded.Besides,the randomkey solution representation and serial scheduling generation scheme are adopted to conveniently obtain a better solution.The Taguchi method is additionally employed to determine key parameters of the algorithm.Finally,on a set of generated realistic instances,we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms all compared algorithms designed for similar optimization problems and can significantly improve the efficiency,and that the established model and the bi-population immune algorithm can effectively respond to the weapon support requirements of carrier-based aircraft under different sortie missions.

Distributed tracking control of unmanned aerial vehicles under wind disturbance and model uncertainty

A distributed robust method is developed for cooperative tracking control of unmanned aerial vehicles under unknown wind disturbance and model uncertainty. The communication network among vehicles is a directed graph with switching topology.Each vehicle can only share its states with its neighbors. Dynamics of the vehicles are nonlinear and affected by the wind disturbance and model uncertainty. Feedback linearization is adopted to transform the dynamics of vehicles into linear systems. To account for the wind disturbance and model uncertainty, a robust controller is designed for each vehicle such that all vehicles ultimately synchronize to the virtual leader in the three-dimensional path. It is theoretically shown that the position states of the vehicles will converge to that of the virtual leader if the communication network has a directed spanning tree rooted at the virtual leader. Furthermore,the robust controller is extended to address the formation control problem. Simulation examples are also given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Trajectory Tracking of Vertical Take-off and Landing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on Disturbance Rejection Control

We investigate the trajectory tracking problem of vertical take-off and landing(VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles(UAV), and propose a practical disturbance rejection control strategy. Firstly, the nonlinear error model is established completely by the modified Rodrigues parameters, while considering dynamics of the servo actuators. Then, a hierarchical control scheme is applied to design the translational and rotational controllers based on the time-scale property of each subsystem,respectively. And the linear extended state observer and auxiliary observer are used to deal with the uncertainties and saturation.At last, global stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed based on the singular perturbation theory. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

Observer-based backstepping longitudinal control for carrier-based UAV with actuator faults

The paper presents the longitudinal control for the carrier-based unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) system with unmeasured states, actuator faults, control input constraints, and external disturbances. By combining output state observer, adaptive fuzzy control, and constraint backstepping technology, a robust fault tolerant control approach is proposed. An output state observer with fuzzy logic systems is developed to estimate unmeasured states,and command filters rather than differentiations of virtual control law are used to solve the computational complexity problem in traditional backstepping. Additionally, a robust term is introduced to offset the fuzzy adaptive estimation error and external disturbance,and an appropriate fault controller structure with matching conditions obtained from fault compensation is proposed. Based on the Lyapunov theory, the designed control program is illustrated to guarantee that all the closed-loop signals of the given system are bounded, and the output errors converge to a small neighborhood of zero. A carrier-based UAV nonlinear longitudinal model is employed to testify the feasibility and validity of the control scheme.The simulation results show that all the controllers can perform at a satisfactory level of reference tracking despite the existence of unknown aerodynamic parameters and actuator faults.

Theoretical Investigations on Mapping Mean Distributions of Particulate Matter,Inert,Reactive,and Secondary Pollutants from Wildfires by Unmanned Air Vehicles(UAVs)

Evaluated Weather Research and Forecasting model inline with chemistry (WRF/Chem) simulations of the 2009 Crazy Mountain Complex wildfire in Interior Alaska served as a testbed for typical Alaska wildfire-smoke conditions. A virtual unmanned air vehicle (UAV) sampled temperatures, dewpoint temperatures, primary inert and reactive gases and particular matter of different sizes as well as secondary pollutants from the WRF/Chem results using different sampling patterns, altitudes and speeds to investigate the impact of the sampling design on obtained mean distributions. In this experimental design, the WRF/Chem data served as the “grand truth” to assess the mean distributions from sampling. During frontal passage, the obtained mean distributions were sensitive to the flight patterns, speeds and heights. For inert constituents mean distributions from sampling agreed with the “grand truth” within a factor of two at 1000 m. Mean distributions of gases involved in photochemistry differed among flight patterns except for ozone. The diurnal cycle of these gases’ concentrations led to overestimation (underestimation) of 20 h means in areas of high (low) concentrations as compared to the “grand truth.” The mean ozone distribution was sensitive to the speed of the virtual UAV. Particulate matter showed the strongest sensitivity to the flight patterns, especially during precipitation.

不同海况条件下舰载无人机着舰安全分析

针对无人机上舰的使用需求,本文对舰载无人机着舰开展了系统的研究。建立了机-舰-环境综合模型和舰载无人机全自动着舰引导控制系统;基于建立的舰载无人机着舰综合模型对不同海况下的着舰过程进行仿真分析,研究不同海况条件以及航母不同航速和遭遇角对着舰安全的影响。仿真研究表明:在复杂海况下,航母可通过适当提高航速以获得更高的着舰成功率,但过高的航速会导致舰尾流扰动加剧,使得着舰成功率显著下降;通过对仿真结果进行统计分析,给出了不同海况下的着舰安全范围,为无人机着舰辅助决策提供参考。

航母舰载无人机全自动着舰技术特点分析

全自动着舰技术是无人机上舰必须解决的“使能”技术。2013年,美军已完成X-47B无人机验证机在航母上的全自动着舰试验验证,为其发展MQ-25A“黄貂鱼”航母舰载无人机装备奠定了良好的技术基础。在梳理飞机着陆与着舰差异的基础上,给出航母舰载无人机全自动着舰的通用流程;从地位作用、工作范围、系统构架、系统要求、实现手段以及关键技术支撑等角度,对比有人机重点分析了航母舰载无人机全自动着舰的特点,为后续关键技术研究和武器装备建设发展提供参考。

基于多传感器融合的无人舰载机舰面定位研究

无人舰载机在航母舰面的自主定位是实现自主转运、提高驶入/驶出效率的重要前提.其中,如何依靠机载传感设备实现GPS拒止环境下的舰载机自主舰面定位是亟待解决的关键技术.为此,提出了一种基于视觉和激光雷达融合的无人舰载机舰面自主定位算法.该算法通过结合手眼标定和互信息标定方法进行多传感器在线标定,使无人舰载机在面对风浪及航母运行等情况下机身摇晃导致传感器外参标定结果变化后仍能保持稳定运行;引入因子图用于无人舰载机的多传感器位姿联合优化并基于自主转运过程中的运动模型建立了简单高效的传感器失效标准,从而有效地融合了激光雷达和视觉定位结果,使该算法在单个传感器失效的情况下依然可以进行精确的自主定位;最后建立了基于多传感器的舰载机舰面仿真系统对本文算法进行验证,实验结果表明,本文算法在单个传感器失效的情况下定位误差仍维持在0.2m以内,满足实际应用要求.

潜空跨介质无人航行器研究现状与分析

潜空跨介质无人航行器是一种不仅可以在空中飞行又可以在水下航行并可以完成多次跨介质运动的无人航行器,为解决因水体环境和空气环境差异引发的问题,对其展开分析。该文介绍近年来国内外潜空跨介质无人航行器的研究成果,分析航行器研究过程中的关键技术和难点。潜空跨介质无人航行器需要设计一套水空一体化的控制器用于平稳地进行多次跨介质运动,并需要解决水下能源和通信问题。潜空跨介质无人航行器集无人飞行器和无人潜行器的优点于一身,在民用领域和军事领域均有着广阔的应用前景。

基于机器学习的四旋翼植保机目标识别研究

为了提高无人植保机的目标识别能力,提升其在复杂环境下自主化作业的适应性,将机器学习算法引入到了植保机目标自主识别系统的设计上,利用神经网络学习算法和图像增强处理技术提高了识别系统的准确性。模拟植保机的作业环境,在作业区域设置了大量的作物目标,通过植保机对目标物的识别对其性能进行了测试,结果表明:植保机可以准确地识别作物目标,满足自主作业时对目标自主识别的设计需求。