Design and simulation of F/A-18a automatic carrier landing guidance controller

The purpose of this paper is to design automatic carrier landing guidance controller for F/A-18A to facilitate subsequent further research. Airwake and deck motion are main factors introduced to the automatic carrier landing system. Airwake model is based on the MIL-F-8785C definitions and the deck motion comes from ESSEX class aircraft carrier. The F/A-18A model and its flight control system are built with some efforts based on exiting data in some published papers. This paper designs three kinds of automatic carrier landing guidance controller for F/A-18A, namely, PID, Fuzzy-PID, PIDDD controller, to find the most reliable in different disturbances. Parameters of controllers are optimized with different methods, respectively, PID tuning in MATLAB, self-optimization and progressive optimization algorithm. Guidance and control effects are mainly presented with images. This paper finds that PIDDD controller is the most reliable to adapt to diferent disturbances and proposes corresponding ideas about design of guidance controller. Design and simulation analysis are processed by MATLAB software.