An Advanced Control Method for Aircraft Carrier Landing of UAV Based on CAPF–NMPC

This paper investigates a carrier landing controller for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and a nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) approach is proposed considering a precise motion control required under dynamic landing platform and environment disturbances. The NMPC controller adopts constraint aware particle filtering (CAPF) to predict deck positions for disturbance compensation and to solve the nonlinear optimization problem, based on a model establishment of carrier motion and wind field. CAPF leverages Monte Carlo sampling to optimally estimate control variables for improved optimization, while utilizing constraint barrier functions to keep particles within a feasible domain. The controller considers constraints such as fuel optimization, control saturation, and flight safety to achieve trajectory control. The advanced control method enhances the solution, estimating optimal control sequences of UAV and forecasting deck positions within a moving visual field, with effective trajectory tracing and higher control accuracy than traditional methods, while significantly reducing single-step computation time. The simulation is carried out using UAV “Silver Fox”, considering several scenarios of different wind scales compared with traditional CAPF–NMPC and the nlmpc method. The results show that the proposed NMPC approach can effectively reduce control chattering, with a landing error in rough marine environments of around 0.08 m, and demonstrate improvements in trajectory tracking capability, constraint performance and computational efficiency.