High-Fidelity Modeling and Control Design for a Cooperative High Altitude Long Endurance Aircraft Landing System

High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) aircraft can take flight to altitudes as high as 20 km and can stay there for long periods of time. In this article, the viability of landing such an aircraft on a mobile platform using a cooperative control strategy for motion synchronization is examined. Time domain system identification is applied to create a model of the Elektra 2 Solar HALE aircraft, which was found to be high fidelity by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) standards. An analysis is made to evaluate the feasibility of autonomously landing the HALE Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) on top of a ground vehicle with a roof-mounted landing platform. Controller synthesis is done for the individual vehicles as well as the cooperative landing control, leading to an examination of the overall system stability and performance, using both deterministic and stochastic methods.