Carrier-Based Aircraft Precision Landing Using Direct Lift Control Based on Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion

Abstract

Conventional direct lift control (DLC) design in carrier landing is not accepted by pilots since it is not fully decoupled and has heavy control burden. Nevertheless, when using dynamic inversion, developed in recent years as the baseline control framework, the control architecture can dynamically decouple control state channels and simplify control logic. In this study, the incremental dynamic inversion control (INDI) method is used to realize the DLC of the carrier-based aircraft precision landing control law and compare the dynamic inversion control (NDI). Meanwhile, the robustness of the INDI control framework is analyzed. A landing simulation system is completed to verify that using the NDI/INDI+DLC framework can fully exploit and reflect the advantage of DLC in carrier landing. The results show that the proposed NDI/INDI+DLC, i.e., the precision landing control architecture, can use the rapidity of DLC to correct minor errors of landing and improve landing accuracy quickly. At the same time, decoupling of DLC based on INDI can also reduce the complexity of the landing operation and improve the landing success rate.

Keywords

• Carrier aircraft landing
• control engineering
• nonlinear control systems
• tracking loops
• trajectory optimization