Control Design Framework For Automated Landing Of A VTOL Drone On A Naval Ship Deck In Adverse Weather

Abstract

This paper presents a design framework for automated landing of a lift-plus-cruise vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial system on a naval ship deck in adverse weather conditions. The work is carried out as part of a project funded by the Dutch Ministry of Defense and has the goal of testing and extending operating limits of VTOL configurations on a naval vessel. The presence of strong relative winds and turbulence on a sailing vessel implies that a lift-plus-cruise configuration will commonly find itself in the transition regime during relative position-keeping and landing in this environment. This leads to a number of distinct challenges for control law design, which requires optimal use of the available control authority and bandwidth throughout the entire velocity regime. The proposed approach aims to extend the operating limits by applying robust control synthesis techniques to i) an existing, cascaded PID setup as benchmark and ii) a unified control law architecture based on incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion. A landing trajectory generation module based on predictions of the ship motion completes the automated landing system. The insights from this paper serve as a basis for control design and future real-world flight tests on a naval ship deck.