Automatic carrier landing system based on active disturbance rejection control with a novel parameters optimizer

This paper proposes an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) scheme for automatic carrier landing system (ACLS) in final approach. To track desired touchdown point (DTP) altitude in the presence of carrier air wake turbulence and deck motion, based on the estimation and compensation of internal dynamics and external disturbances by extended state observer (ESO), outer-loop altitude controller and inner-loop attitude controllers are designed via ADRC. Moreover, tracking differentiator-based deck motion compensation (TD-DMC) is designed to eliminate the inherent phase lag in ACLS. In addition, controller parameters are optimized via a novel Levy flight based whale optimization algorithm (LWOA). Finally, comparative simulations demonstrate that the proposed ADRC-based ACLS has better tracking performance and robustness compared to conventional ACLS. (C) 2017 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.