Segmented action guidance strategy for autonomous shipborne landing of fixed-wing UAV

In order to land a fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) on a moving platform, serval problems should be addressed. For example, the landing platform moves rapidly, and the UAV has to maintain high speed to generate sufficient lift while it cannot brake in mid-air at will. A segmented guidance strategy is proposed based on action planning. The autonomous shipborne landing process is divided into two stages: transition guidance and approach guidance. In the transition guidance stage, a finite state machine is utilized to guide the fixed-wing UAV from any initial state to a specific distance behind the moving deck. In the approach guidance stage, the action sampling is used to adjust the trajectory in real-time to guide the UAV to touch the deck accurately. Numerical simulation and FlightGear based semi-physical simulation demonstrate that the proposed strategy can effectively guide the fixed-wing UAV from any initial state to the carrier deck with different moving speeds and turbulence, and the landing error is within 2 m.