Direct lift carrier landing control based on disturbance compensation MPC

To address the challenges faced by carrier-based aircraft during the final landing phase, such as severe time-varying disturbances from air wake and deck motion, as well as the stringent Angle of Attack (AOA) stability requirement for Direct Lift Control (DLC), this paper proposes a DLC landing control framework based on disturbance-compensating Model Predictive Control (MPC). Firstly, to provide the controller with accurate state and command information, a smooth and continuous landing guidance trajectory is generated based on deck motion prediction; a high-order state and disturbance observer is designed to achieve simultaneous, high-precision estimation of the aircraft's states and external disturbances. Secondly, a dual-channel framework, consisting of a “one-step” disturbance prediction embedded within the MPC and an AOA-prioritized adaptive feedforward compensator, is developed to achieve prioritized AOA stabilization and precise trajectory tracking. Finally, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method are validated through comparative simulations under various sea states. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework can achieve excellent AOA stability and high-precision trajectory tracking performance in the presence of strong disturbances.