Flight control design for helicopter landing on moving ship

The purpose of this study is to develop an accurate simulation environment for the helicopter/ship dynamic interface system and to design a multi-objective helicopter flight controller for comfortable and safe landing during shipboard operations. The developed high-fidelity helicopter/ship simulation model contains an interdisciplinary integration among four dynamic systems: (1) the six-degree-of-freedom nonlinear dynamics of helicopter, (2) the ship-deck dynamics on heaving wave, (3) the ship airwake dynamics due to ship's superstructure, and (4) the stochastic wind gust dynamics. The mission for a helicopter landing on a shipboard poses strict requirements on the flight control design to ensure accurate tracking performances. In this paper, a control design based on mixed H₂/H_∞ approach and solved by the method of linear matrix inequality (LMI) is proposed to satisfy the multi-objective control requirements in a ship-landing mission. The performance of the proposed flight controller is validated in the developed helicopter/ship interfacial simulation environment within which the ability of the designed control system to attenuate the disturbances due to wind gust and airwake in the presence of model uncertainties is justified.