Innovative Rotorcraft/Ship Environment Suppression for Enhanced DI Flight Control

Rotorcraft flight operations in the shipboard environment, called the Dynamic Interface, is extremely challenging due to the motion of the ship deck and the surrounding turbulent ship airwake. Higher bandwidth flight controls can improve vehicle handling qualities for supporting both manned and unmanned operations of rotorcraft from ships, but these may only be implemented if due consideration is given for both rotor dynamic response and accurate ship motion measurement. The work proposed here will address these issues through an innovative blending of rotor motion estimation and feedback with augmented measurement of ship deck motion, providing sufficient control system lead for expanding the safe operational environment of rotorcraft in the DI environment. Considerable leverage will be made from CDI’s past work in DI simulation, rotorcraft aerodynamic analysis, ship airwake prediction, flight control design, rotor motion sensor hardware development, and rotor state feedback control. Validation of the approach using both batch and manned flight simulation on PCs will be combined with a system integration study to address implementation issues for current and future rotorcraft in the Phase I program. Follow-on work will culminate in a complete hardware-in-the-loop manned flight simulation test program to provide system risk-reduction prior to Phase III flight testing.