Guidance and Control Techniques for Automated Air Traffic Control

Abstract

A guidance technique has been developed for flying an aircraft automatically along curved trajectories. The technique consists of a set of algorithms for automatically synthesizing flight profiles, i.e., the horizontal trajectory, the altitude and speed profiles, and a time sequence of commands. The flyability Of the synthesized profile under wind disturbances and initial condition error is verified by closing the loop around the synthesized trajectory and flying it in a computer-simul ated jet aircraft. A control law having longitudinal, lateral and heading deviation from the synthesized profile in the feedback loops is used for the simulated flight. The performance of the system is excellent, errors that are initially zero never exceed 230 ft and large initial errors are reduced rapidly. The system also behaves quite well under wind disturbance. For example, the longitudinal and lateral deviations never exceed 470 ft for a 10-knot error in estimated wind velocity. This paper presents the flight-profile synthesis algorithms, describes the control law, analyzes the overall system performance under initial errors and error in steady wind estimates, and discusses the simulation results.