The final phase of a helicopter automatic landing on a vessel’s deck

Abstract

The paper presents part of the results obtained in the HELIMARIS project (”Modification of an optionally piloted helicopter for maritime mission performance”) led by PZL Swidnik in cooperation with Warsaw University of Technology and CTO. In the paper, way of integration of light helicopter dynamic model, automatic control and prediction algorithm for landing on the moving vessel at different sea states is presented. For the purpose of the landing task a Linear Quadratic Regulator (helicopter control) and autoregressive method with parameters calculated using Burg’s method (vessel movement prediction) are used. The model of the helicopter is developed and evaluated in FLIGHTLAB software using flight test data for validation. Developed system for landing of the helicopter on the vessel is presented, results are shown and discussed.