Rope-Hook Recovery Controller Designed for a Flying-Wing UAV

Due to the complexity of landing environments, precision guidance and high-precision control technology have become key to the rope-hook recovery of shipborne unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The recovery process was divided into three stages and a reasonable guidance strategy had been designed for them, respectively. This study separated the guidance and control issues into an outer guidance loop and an inner control loop. The inner loop (attitude control loop) controled the UAV to follow the acceleration commands generated by the outer loop (trajectory tracking loop). The inner loop of the longitudinal controller and the lateral controller were designed based on active disturbance rejection control (ADRC), which has strong anti-interference ability. In the last phase, the outer loop of the longitudinal controller switched from a total energy control system (TECS), which greatly decoupled the altitude channel and speed channel, to the proportional navigation (PN) guidance law, while the outer loop of lateral controller switches from the proportional control law based on the L1 guidance law, which can reduce the tracking error and deviation, to the PN guidance law, which considerably enhances the tracking precision. Finally, the simulation data and flight test data show that the controller has strong robustness and good tracking precision, which ensures safe rope-hook recovery.

Optimization of the PNG Law for a Dual-Spin Mortar with Fixed Canards

The limited instantaneous overload available and the curved trajectory lead to adaptivity problems for the proportional navigation guidance (PNG) of a guided mortar with a fixed-canard trajectory correction fuze. In this paper, the optimization of a PNG law with gravity compensation is established. Instead of using the traditional empirical method, the selection of the proportional navigation constants is formulated as an optimization problem, which is solved using an intelligent optimization algorithm. Two optimization schemes are proposed for constructing corresponding optimization models. In schemes 1 and 2, the sum squared error between the impact point and target and the circular error probability (CEP), respectively, are taken as the objective function. Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the two optimization schemes, and their guidance performance is compared through trajectory simulations. The simulation results show that the impact point dispersion can be efficiently reduced under both proposed schemes. Scheme 2 achieves a lower CEP, which is approximately 2.9 m and 2.4 times smaller than that achieved by scheme 1. Moreover, the mean impact point is closer to the target.

Pursuer Navigation Based on Proportional Navigation and Optimal Information Fusion

Pursuer navigation is proposed based on the three-dimensional proportional navigation law, and this method presents a family of navigation laws resulting in a rich behavior for different parameters. Firstly, the kinematics model for the pursuer and the target is established. Secondly, the proportional navigation law is deduced through the kinematics model. Based on point-to-point navigation, obstacle avoidance is implemented by adjusting the control parameters, and the combination can enrich the application range of obstacle avoidance and guidance laws. Thirdly, information fusion weighted by diagonal matrices is used for decreasing the tracking precision. Finally, simulations are conducted in the MATLAB environment. Simulation results verify the availability of the proposed navigation law.

FOV constrained guidance law for nonstationary nonmaneuvering target interception with any impact angle

This paper presents the nonstationary nonmaneuvering target interception with all possible desired impact angles in a two-dimensional (2D) aerial engagement scenario, where the target can move in any direction. The paper also considers the field-of-view (FOV) constraint for designing the guidance law so that the target is always visible while following the missile trajectory in the entire engagement time, which makes it feasible for real world applications. The guidance law is based on the pure proportional navigation (PPN) to achieve any impact angle of the entire angular spectrum. The proposed guidance law is then simulated for intercepting a nonstationary nonmaneuvering target using a kinematic model of a missile to demonstrate the efficacy of the presented scheme. A comparison with the related work existing in the literature has also been added to establish the superiority of the present work.