Aircraft-on-ground path following control by dynamical adaptive backstepping

The necessity of improving the air traffic and reducing the aviation emissions drives to investigate automatic steering for aircraft to effectively roll on the ground. This paper addresses the path following control problem of aircraft-on-ground and focuses on the task that the aircraft is required to follow the desired path on the runway by nose wheel automatic steering. The proposed approach is based on dynamical adaptive backstepping so that the system model does not have to be transformed into a canonical triangular form which is necessary in conventional backstepping design. This adaptive controller performs well despite the lack of information on the aerodynamic load and the tire cornering stiffness parameters. Simulation results clearly demonstrate the advantages and effectiveness of the proposed approach.