On the Complete Automation of Vertical Flight Aircraft Ship Landing
Abstract
The current study focuses on developing an autonomous vertical flight aircraft ship landing system by directly automating the established Navy helicopter ship landing procedure. The central idea involves visually tracking a gyro-stabilized horizon bar installed on most Navy ships to approach and land vertically independent of deck motions. This was accomplished through the development of a rotorcraft flight dynamics modeling framework and vision-based control systems as well as conducting simulations and flight tests.
The framework, named Texas A&M Rotorcraft Analysis Code (TRAC), was developed as a modular tool that could model any rotorcraft configuration at a low computational cost. A UH-60 helicopter was modeled as a baseline aircraft and validated using the US Army flight test data. A linear quadratic regulator (LQR) controller was utilized to stabilize and control the helicopter during autonomous ship landing simulations.
The vision system was developed to obtain the visual information that a pilot perceives during ship approach and landing. It detects the ship at long-distance by utilizing machine/deep learning-based detection and at close range, it utilizes uniquely developed vision algorithms to detect the horizon bar to precisely estimate the aircraft position and orientation relative to the bar. It demonstrated 250 meters of detection range for a 6 x 6 ft sub-scale ship platform, which translates to a range of 17.3 kilometers for a full-scale 50 x 50 ft typical small ship. The distance and attitude estimations were validated using the measurements from an accurate 3D motion capture system (VICON), which demonstrated sub-centimeter and sub-degree accuracy.
To control the aircraft based on the perceived visual information, both nonlinear control and deep reinforcement learning control strategies were developed. The nonlinear controller demonstrated robust tracking capability even with 0.5 seconds of time delay and estimation noise. When flight-tested in 5 m/s wind gust, the deep reinforcement learning control demonstrated superior disturbance rejection capability, with 50% reduced drift at a 3 times faster rate compared to conventional control systems. Both vision and control systems were implemented on a quadrotor unmanned aircraft and extensive flight tests were conducted to demonstrate accurate tracking in challenging conditions and safe vertical landing on a translating ship platform with 6 degrees of freedom motions.
Subject
Autonomous Ship LandingMachine Learning
Deep Learning
Reinforcement Learning
Intelligent System
Machine Vision
Nonlinear Control System
Unmanned Aerial System
YOLOv3
TRAC
Helicopter
Helicopter Modeling
Computer Vision
Citation
Lee, Bochan (2021). On the Complete Automation of Vertical Flight Aircraft Ship Landing. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /195166.