Robust Adaptive Control and Motion Planning of Twin-Rotor Aircraft in Shipboard Operation

In this paper, we propose control design techniques for a twin-rotor aircraft with specific focus on attaining good disturbance attenuation properties to facilitate operation in a shipboard environment wherein the aircraft is subject to severe aerodynamic disturbances including ship airwake, deck vortices, and rotor downwash especially during ship roll and pitch motions. The proposed hierarchical control system provides significant robustness and reliability improvements under severe aerodynamic disturbance conditions which are well-recognized as posing a challenging problem for twin-rotor aircraft control. Furthermore, the proposed controllers can operate on their own or can gracefully co-exist with a baseline controller in a control augmentation fashion to minimize flight software change impact. The stability and performance of the proposed controllers are validated through simulation based studies.