Automatic Landing System Design and Simulation of a Fixed-Wing UAV

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-4060.vid Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), especially fixed wing type, have been to improve efficiency, safety, and performance such as in various fields such as in farming, mapping, or surveillance. Fixed wing type UAV, despite of their advantages in speed, altitude, and range compared to helicopter or multirotor, is still facing a problem in landing safely and automatically. The most common method is to use a net to catch the UAV after a mission, which will increase dependencies from ground station and reduces the UAV portability. Therefore, developing a suitable automatic landing system for fixed wing UAV might be a better solution. This research is conducted to develop a complete fixed wing UAV model that can simulate a complete mission and can be used as basis to build a desired yet simple automatic landing control and guidance law. A UAV model built on MATLAB/Simulink environment is employed, which can simulate the vehicle in all its 6 Degree of Freedom. A landing gear dynamic model is added to observe the landing loads on impact and the ground maneuvers. Using pole placement for stabilization loop and PID controller for the control and guidance loop, the automatic landing system can perform automatic landing with no wind disturbance. The automatic landing system can also guide the UAV to do turn around maneuver if the UAV position is not proper to start landing. The result shows that the required landing distance from 100 m altitude with 20 m/s airspeed and 2.5 degrees glideslope is 2500 m. To accommodate wind disturbance during landing, the automatic landing system need to be improved with more robust control design.