C. Dadswell, M. Jump

A vertical landing onto the moving deck of a ship can be challenging even for an experienced aircrew. As interest continues to grow in the use of Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) in military and specifically naval environments, new technologies will be required to improve the safety and reliability of UAS landings at sea. Existing solutions to this are not truly autonomous as they have used infrastructure other than onboard sensors. Tau-Theory is one method proposed to make these vehicles truly autonomous during a deck landing. Tau-Theory seeks to explain how observers guide themselves through the cluttered environment that is the Earth's surface. A simulation environment was created to explore the use of tau, or time-to-contact, as the reference control variable in a feedback control system to land different scales of rotary-wing UAS landing on a moving ship deck. The results of the simulation experiments showed that using tau did provide an advantage over a more conventional descent technique in terms of reduced touchdown velocities if tau could be sensed accurately to the point of touchdown. The developed controller was also agnostic of the vehicle used. However, the passive perception of tau close to the deck became inaccurate when sensed with the gradient methods and visual scene used in this study. Safe touchdowns could still be achieved by the inclusion of an active means to obtain tau during the terminal phase of the descent. The success of the tau-based controller in reducing descent rates was also examined relative to the aircraft's excess heave power available for deck motion at any instant during a landing. As such, a method was developed to help to predict when sufficient control power was available and is presented in this paper.

49th European Rotorcraft Forum 2023, Bückeburg, 2023

Conference Paper

englisch

21,0 x 29,7 cm, 16 Seiten

DGLR-Bericht, 2023, 2023-01, 49th European Rotorcraft Forum 2023 - Proceedings; S.1-16; 2023; Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt - Lilienthal-Oberth e.V., Bonn

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2023