Unpredictable conditions experienced by an impaired aircraft in its flight path demands that the guidance techniques for succeeding phases be robust. Therefore, we need new control formalisms to improve the safe flight and landing of impaired aircraft. In particular, new aircraft guidance and control technologies should be developed that can accommodate for aero-surface faults, thrust variations, or dispersions from the desired trajectory and also allow for landing at different landing sites. The developed techniques are particularly critical during the approach and landing (A&L) phase of an impaired aircraft. In this work, an adaptive guidance/control method is presented that lands the aircraft safely once a fault has occurred. Typically, an aircraft travel from one place to another place takes place with a pre planned path and the controller enabling the aircraft to fly the pre planned path. However, once a fault has occurred, the impaired aircraft may or may not be able to fly the pre planned path. A new path will have to be constructed online and the aircraft may have to follow the revised trajectory in order to safely land at an alternate location. This paper considers such a scenario and new schemes are devised based on an integrated path planning and control approach and adaptive control. A state model comprising of both the kinematic states and the dynamic states are considered in this paper to account for path planning and control of the aircraft to fly on the online defined path. Acting on a combination of optimal and adaptive control schemes, both the path planning and control needs to land the aircraft at a feasible landing site are satisfied. Numerical results are shown that consider and thrust being cut off. Representative results are shown with the new integrated path planning and control scheme.
- Adaptive control systems,
- Air navigation,
- Air traffic control,
- Aviation,
- Fighter aircraft,
- Landing,
- Motion planning,
- Navigation,
- Adaptive guidance,
- Aircraft guidance,
- Approach and landings,
- Desired trajectories,
- Numerical results,
- Optimal and adaptive controls,
- Path planning and control,
- Thrust variations,
- Aircraft control
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/sn-balakrishnan/226/