A vision/radar/ins integrated guidance method for shipboard landing

This paper presents a vision/radar/INS integrated guidance system for shipboard landing. The vision system on the aircraft tracks landmarks on the ship and outputs their coordinates in the image. The motion information of aircraft is obtained from airborne inertial navigation system (INS). Meanwhile, the datalink receives the relative position between the ship and aircraft from the shipboard radar and the ship motion information from shipboard sensors. The federated filter is utilized to fuse the vision, radar and inertial information, and the information from INS is chosen as the reference system in the federated filter. The estimated ship motion information is utilized to calculate the glide-down path. All the guidance information is regarded as the feedback information given to the flight control system to calculate control command. A designed on-vehicle experiment shows that the vision/radar/INS integrated landing guidance system achieves satisfied results.