Development of a Unified Simulation and Control Tool to Enhance Shipboard Operation

This paper presents an innovative rotorcraft flight control design tool that was developed to provide a unified shipboard rotorcraft flight control design and evaluation environment. The unified control design and evaluation environment will facilitate (1) an accurate generation of the control plant model, (2) the development of a shipboard disturbance model in order to take into account the effect of the turbulent ship airwake in the control design, (3) the performance of advanced control options design, and (4) the comprehensive validation of the control design through both engineering analysis and pilot-in-the-loop real time simulation. The research in this paper successfully formulated an accurate shipboard environment disturbance model that contains the essential effects of the turbulent ship airwake to be accommodated in the control design. To support the flight control system design tool, ART also developed a set of FLIGHTLAB utility functions that were applied to the frequency analysis, the filter design with nonlinear least square fitting, and the FLIGHTLAB interface for coupling with SIMULINK® to facilitate the control system design process. Intensive efforts were also dedicated to investigating the control options which improved shipboard rotorcraft handing qualities by significantly reducing the pilot workload under the influence of shipboard operating conditions including the effect of the ship motion and the turbulent ship airwake.