In-flight compound homing methodology of parafoil delivery systems under multiple constraints

Abstract In order to realize accurate and secure homing control of the parafoil delivery systems under multiple constraints, an in-flight compound homing methodology is designed in this paper. It consists of the modeling of parafoil delivery systems, a trajectory optimization method based on quantum genetic algorithm, a control approach based on active disturbance rejection control. Firstly, the precise model of parafoil delivery system is established by the actual flight data. Then, in order to restrain the wind disturbance, a novel wind identification method is introduced into the trajectory optimization method. Combining the wind identification method and terrain-matching, the proposed trajectory optimization method highlights its improvement from the traditional homing approach. It can not only obtain an optimal trajectory in windy environment, but also maintain the essential advantage of the multiphase homing methodology – great realizability. Then, the ADRC controller is designed. It is applied to resist the varying wind and other disturbance. At last, the hardware-in-the-loop simulation results show that the proposed compound homing methodology can achieve excellent effects both in the trajectory optimization and trajectory tracking. In this paper, the proposed methodology is also compared with the trajectory optimization based on chaos particle swarm optimization method and the PID technology of the trajectory tracking. The results also present huge improvement and wide application prospect.