Online Path Planning for Aircraft Landing Mission

In this paper, a path planning method is developed for an aircraft approaching a moving ship. The smooth Dubins-Helix trajectory is firstly introduced to realize 3-D path planning between any two given states. To ensure the aircraft and ship arrive at the final states simultaneously, an iterative algorithm is designed to determine the proper final coordinates, heading angles and pitch angles. Then the approaching path for the aircraft is designed by calculating the smooth Dubins-Helix trajectory between the initial and final states. The effectiveness and real-time performance of the method are verified using numerical simulations.