Nonlinear control for automatic carrier landing with deck motion compensation

This paper presents a nonlinear path-following control scheme with constant angle of attack for automatic carrier landing system in final approach. Based on the six degrees-of-freedom (6-DOF) aircraft model, back-stepping technique is adopted as the main control framework. To facilitate the controller design, some transformations are made to the model. Since low speed will cause unstability during landing, a novel control scheme, which maintains a constant angle of attack, is proposed. The angle of attack is controlled by thrust independently. In order to ensure control performance in the presence of deck motion, deck motion compensation is proposed to generate ideal glide path in real time considering two aspects: the trajectory applicable to the fixed runway, and the current state of both aircraft and carrier. Finally, the synthetic environment used for numerical validation is modeled. Simulations based on a nonlinear 6- DOF model show effectiveness of the proposed control scheme even in the presence of carrier air wake and deck motion.