Guidance and Control System Design for Automatic Carrier Landing of a UAV

Abstract

This paper presents the guidance and control design for automatic carrier landing of a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). Differently from automatic landing on a runway on the ground, the motion of a carrier deck is not fixed and affected by external factors such as ship movement and sea state. For this reason, robust guidance/control law is required for safe shipboard landing by taking the relative geometry between the UAV and the carrier deck into account. In this work, linear quadratic optimal controller and longitudinal/lateral trajectory tracking guidance algorithm are developed based on a linear UAV model. The feasibility of the proposed control scheme and guidance law for the carrier landing are verified via numerical simulations using X-Plane and Matlab/simulink.