Analysis and Comparison of Cooperative Control Architectures for Landing a Small Fixed-Wing Aircraft on a Mobile Platform

Abstract

The successful landing of a fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) on top of an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) has been accomplished by researchers at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Still, some aspects of the cooperative controller require further analysis and there is some room for improvement in the control strategy, most importantly, the robustness of the system needs to be assessed. In this thesis, modifications within the current cooperative control architecture are proposed in order to make the system faster and more robust. Different PID-based controller structures are used to close the loop and connect the vehicles. An optimization-based method is employed to select an optimal set of controller parameters. Finally, a sensitivity analysis test is performed using two approaches: a time-domain analysis, based on Monte Carlo simulations, and a frequency-domain analysis.