An Adaptive Control Scheme for Carrier Landing of UAV

This paper studies the automatic carrier landing control problem of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), by applying a model reference adaptive control (MRAC) scheme to deal with system uncertainties. Two key issues are solved for UAV carrier landing, including flight deck motion disturbance compensation and glide slope tracking control. An automatic carrier landing system (ACLS) for carrier-based UAV is developed, in which the flight control subsystem plays an important role. A state feedback for output tracking multivariable MRAC scheme is used to design the longitudinal flight controller and the lateral flight controller, which guarantees the arbitrary reference trajectory tracking. Simulation results demonstrate that the adaptive ACLS ensures the UAV asymptotically track the glide path even under the flight deck motion disturbance.