Unmanned F/A-18 Aircraft Landing Control on Aircraft Carrier in Adverse Conditions

Abstract Carrier landing of aircrafts is a challenge for control due to the existence of nonlinear wind disturbances and the requirements of changing reference trajectories. In this paper, a robust landing control system is presented for carrier landing of unmanned F/A-18 aircraft. In the control system, an augmented observer is applied to estimate the combined disturbances in the pitch dynamics of F/A-18 aircraft during carrier landing. Therefore, the control performance is improved through the control compensations from these estimations. Additionally, the controllers are designed to regulate the velocity, rate of descent and vertical position. A full model, including the nonlinear flight dynamics, controller, carrier deck motion, wind and measurement noise, is constructed numerically and implemented in software. Combining the observer with a proportional-derivative (PD) control, the proposed pitch control shows the better transient characteristics and stronger robustness than a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller. The simulations verify that the designed control system can make the aircraft quickly track a time-varying reference despite the existence of nonlinear disturbances and noise.