An Autonomous Carrier Landing System for Unmannned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

One of the important problems related to naval Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), is the design of an automatic landing system that would enable autonomous landing of a UAV on an aircraft carrier. When landing needs to be accomplished safely in the high sea states and during the carrier turns, the problem becomes highly complex. In this paper we present an innovative autonomous carrier landing system for UAVs, referred to as the Carrier Motion Prediction & Autonomous Landing (CM-PAL) system. The system is based on real-time estimation of magnitudes and frequencies of waves encountered by the carrier, and online prediction of the carrier motion. This prediction generates information regarding the carrier states at touchdown; this information is in turn used to generate corrections in the UAV’s heading and flight path angle commands to achieve minimum dispersion around the desired touchdown point and heading. We also present performance evaluation results of the CM-PAL system on a high-fidelity simulation of typical aircraft carrier dynamics.