Automatic carrier landing control for unmanned aerial vehicles based on preview control and particle filtering

For the carrier-based unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), one of the important problems is the design of an automatic carrier landing system (ACLS) that would enable autonomous landing of the UAVs on a moving aircraft carrier. However, the safe autolanding on a moving aircraft is a complex task, mainly because of the deck motion and airwake disturbances, and dimension limitation. In this paper, an innovative ACLS system for carrier-based UAVs is developed, which is composed of the flight deck motion prediction, reference glide slope generation and integrated guidance and control (IGC) modules. The particle filtering method is used to online predict the magnitudes and frequencies of the deck motion, which are used to correct the reference glide slope to achieve minimum dispersion around the ideal touchdown point. An optimal preview control (OPC) scheme is presented for the IGC subsystem design, which fuses the preview information of the reference glide slope, equality constraint of UAV dynamics and performance index function, and predicted information of the carrier deck motion. Simulation results of a nonlinear UAV model show the effectiveness of the ACLS system in carrier autolanding under the deck motion and airwake disturbances.