On the applicability of linear control techniques for autonomous landing of helicopters on the deck of a ship

Autonomous landing of helicopters on the deck of a ship still being an open problem due to the inherent difficulties of operation in this kind of scenario. This paper analyses the validity of three linear control techniques (LQI, MPC and LSD) for dealing with the complex landing trajectories imposed by ship movements. To this end, elaborated nonlinear models of helicopter and ship dynamics have been developed. A linearized version of the helicopter model was used in the design phase of the controllers whereas the complete nonlinear models of both the helicopter and the ship have been employed for the final validation in simulation. The implementation has been performed in a PC-104 platform by means of the real-time framework of Matlab, in such a way that experimentation with real system was a straightforward extension of this work.