Collision Avoidance Study for Towbarless Aircraft Taxiing Systems on the Airport Apron Considering the Measuring Uncertainty

The towbarless aircraft taxiing system (TLATS) consists of the towbarless towing vehicle (TLTV) and the aircraft. The tractor realizes the towing work by fixing the nose wheel. During the towing process, the tractor driver may cause the aircraft to collide with an obstacle because of the blind spot of vision leading to the accident. The special characteristics of aircraft do not allow us to modify the structure of the aircraft to achieve collision avoidance. In this paper, three degrees of freedom (DOE) kinematic model of the tractor system is established for each of the two cases of pushing and pulling the aircraft, and the relationship between the coordinates of each danger point and the relatively articulated angle of the TLATS and the velocity of the midpoint of the rear axle is derived. Considering that there is an error between the velocity and relatively articulated angle measured by the sensor and the actual one, the effect of velocity and relatively articulated angle uncertainty on the traction trajectory of the aircraft-tractor system is investigated based on the Chebyshev expansion function. The calculation efficiency and the result range of Chebyshev method and those of Monte Carlo(MC) method are compared. An aircraft collision avoidance model on the apron is established based on Simulink. The simulation results show that the method can achieve the measurement of aircraft attitude and position and realize the anti-collision.