Trajectory planning and tracking control for towed carrier aircraft system

Abstract As an efficient and safe dispatching scheme is of great importance to ensure the effectiveness and safety of personnel on the Aircraft Carrier, and the towed aircraft system without bar is a common means of dispatching, the dispatching of the system is a significance and interesting question. In this paper, the towed carrier aircraft system without bar is transformed into a tractor–trailer system, and the nonlinear motion constraint is proposed. In order to improve the efficiency and safety of dispatching, the trajectory-planning and tracking of the system are studied, respectively. Obstacles in the environment and the nonlinear motion constraints are taken into consideration, the trajectory-planning is transformed into the optimal control problem, and combined with the symplecticity and pseudospectral method, an offline optimal control algorithm with high efficiency is proposed firstly. In order to accurately track the obtained trajectory, an online tracking method is proposed based on the receding horizon control (RHC) theory and the offline optimal control algorithm. Finally, the offline trajectory-planning algorithm has been proved by simulation experiment, it shows that the algorithm has high computational efficiency and good applicability. And the system can track the standard trajectory, even though there are disturbances in the environment, with high precision using the online tracking method, the calculation efficiency is also verified, and real-time tracking can be achieved.