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.