Robust Helicopter Ship Deck Landing With Guaranteed Timing Using Shrinking-Horizon Model Predictive Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient Shrinking-Horizon Model Predictive Control algorithm for autonomous helicopter landings on moving ship decks, ensuring safety, timing, and high precision even in strong winds.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel SHMPC-based method with disturbance feedback for guaranteed timing and safety in helicopter ship deck landings under disturbances.

Findings

High landing precision achieved in simulations

Effective disturbance rejection performance

Real-time computation within milliseconds

Abstract

We present a runtime efficient algorithm for autonomous helicopter landings on moving ship decks based on Shrinking-Horizon Model Predictive Control (SHMPC). First, a suitable planning model capturing the relevant aspects of the full nonlinear helicopter dynamics is derived. Next, we use the SHMPC together with a touchdown controller stage to ensure a pre-specified maneuver time and an associated landing time window despite the presence of disturbances. A high disturbance rejection performance is achieved by designing an ancillary controller with disturbance feedback. Thus, given a target position and time, a safe landing with suitable terminal conditions is be guaranteed if the initial optimization problem is feasible. The efficacy of our approach is shown in simulation where all maneuvers achieve a high landing precision in strong winds while satisfying timing and operational constraints with maximum computation times in the millisecond range.