State-Dependent Riccati Equation-Based UAV Path Following Guidance for Shipborne Net Recovery

The landing of a fixed-wing aircraft on a ship is a challenging task due to a constrained landing space, wind disturbances, and the ship motion. In this paper, we consider the landing problem as a moving path following problem and present a decoupled three-dimensional State-Dependent Riccati Equation (SDRE)-based guidance law for net recovery landing of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on board a ship deck. Stability analysis of the guidance law is carried out and its performance is evaluated on aerosonde UAV in MATLAB and RASCAL aircraft in software-in-the-loop (SITL) taking actuator dynamics, different sea states for ship motion and varying wind disturbances into account. The proposed approach shows the general applicability of the guidance law for different types of aircraft.