Innovative Rotorcraft Control for Shipboard Operations

An adaptive flight control concept is proposed to better compensate for disturbances on the rotorcraft due to ship airwake effects and the moving ship deck during helicopter or tiltrotor shipboard operations. The flight controller could ultimately be used on a fully autonomous system or in a pilot-assist mode on manned rotorcraft. A parameter identification algorithm and an on-line learning approach will be applied to estimate in real-time important effects of the ship airwake and ship motion. The system would identify both the statistical properties of the apparently random characteristics of the airwake as well as the re-peatable and deterministic disturbances of the airwake due to the ship’s geometry and motion. A flight controller will be designed that uses the information from the on-line learning algorithms to improve dis-turbance rejection properties of the aircraft. The system would provide enhanced feedback compensation to improve rejection of disturbances due to random airwake forces impinging on the vehicle, and feed-forward compensation to help compensate for deterministic airwake disturbances. A high-fidelity tilt-rotor UAV simulation will be further advanced and employed to demonstrate and evaluate the adaptive control system. Preliminary real-time piloted simulations will be the focus of the Phase I Option effort.