Automatic Landing Control of a Very Flexible Flying Wing

This paper investigates the landing control of a highly flexible flying wing model. An automatic landing control system is developed based on the reduced-order linear model, which employs a two-loop control scheme. The outer loop employs the LADRC (linear active disturbance rejection control) and PI control algorithms to track the reference landing trajectory and vertical speed respectively, and generate the attitude command based on which the inner loop uses H∞ control to compute the control inputs to the corresponding control surfaces. A landing trajectory generator is designed to generate real-time commands for the landing control system with a pre-compensator introduced to improve the dynamic tracking performance. Simulation results based on the full-order nonlinear model show that the automatic landing control system is able to land the flying wing effectively and safely, showing good performances in tracking and robustness against the wind disturbances.