Robust adaptive preview control design for autonomous carrier landing of F/A-18 aircraft

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to design an innovative autonomous carrier landing system (ACLS) using novel robust adaptive preview control (RAPC) method, which can assure safe and successful autonomous carrier landing under the influence of airwake disturbance and irregular deck motion. To design a deck motion predictor based on an unscented Kalman filter (UKF), which predicts the touchdown point, very precisely. Design/methodology/approach An ACLS is comprising a UKF based deck motion predictor, a previewable glide path module and a control system. The previewable information is augmented with the system and then latitude and longitudinal controllers are designed based on the preview control scheme, in which the robust adaptive feedback and feedforward gain’s laws are obtained through Lyapunov stability theorem and linear matrix inequality approach, guarantying the closed-loop system’s asymptotic stability. Findings The autonomous carrier landing problem is solved by proposing robust ACLS, which is validated through numerical simulation in presence of sea disturbance and time-varying external disturbances. Practical implications The ACLS is designed considering the practical aspects of the application, presenting superior performance with extended robustness. Originality/value The novel RAPC, relative motion-based guidance system and deck motion compensation mechanism are developed and presented, never been implemented for autonomous carrier landing operations.