Autonomous Landing Using Carrier-Phase GPS/IMU Fused Instrumentation System

S. H. Chan, M. J. Stolarczyk, M. F. Abdel-Hafez, W. R. Williamson, I. Rhee and J. L. Speyer

Abstract:	The problem that is posed is to land multiple aircraft automatically using GPS. The autonomous landing of a single aircraft using the differential phase GPS/IMU fused instrumentation system is described for a small remotely powered vehicle, called the MULE. The goal is to have this aircraft track a landing trajectory. Both the longitudinal and lateral controllers were designed using Linear- Quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) control synthesis. To obtain zero steady state tracking of a ramp in altitude and velocity to the landing point, a number of integrators were introduced into the compensator. The control system was first modeled and simulated in MATLAB and Simulink to create a perfect information environment. Then the controller was implemented using a flight instrumentation system, called Formation Flight Instrumentation System (FFIS), and tested in a real time hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILSIM) in the presence of noisy and incomplete measurements of the state, air turbulences and communication lag and loss in the system. In the autonomous landing system one of the FFIS is fixed near the landing site and the other one is on the vehicle. The MULE’s aero data is available from flight tests on the small aircraft. This aircraft model was used to develop a reduced order dynamic system for the controller design and simulation in both the MATLAB tests and in the HILSIM tests. In the HILSIM tests with full state feedback of the differential carrier-phase GPS/IMU fused instrumentation system we were able to land with bias errors in x-position and y-position of only about 14 cm with a standard deviation of 6 cm and about 23 cm and with a standard deviation of 10 cm, respectively.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 15th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 2002) September 24 - 27, 2002 Oregon Convention Center Portland, OR
Pages:	1975 - 1984
Cite this article:	Chan, S. H., Stolarczyk, M. J., Abdel-Hafez, M. F., Williamson, W. R., Rhee, I., Speyer, J. L., "Autonomous Landing Using Carrier-Phase GPS/IMU Fused Instrumentation System," Proceedings of the 15th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 2002), Portland, OR, September 2002, pp. 1975-1984.
Full Paper:	ION Members/Non-Members: 1 Download Credit Sign In