The PAPI Lights-Based Vision System for Aircraft Automatic Control during Approach and Landing

The paper presents the concept of a component of an aircraft’s automatic flight control system, controlling the airplane when in longitudinal motion (i.e., pitch angle, sink rate, airspeed channels) during automatic landing, from a final approach until a touchdown. It is composed of two key parts: a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Aerospace 2022-06, Vol.9 (6), p.285
Main Authors: Nowak, Dariusz, Kopecki, Grzegorz, Kordos, Damian, Rogalski, Tomasz
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aircraft
Aircraft control
Aircraft landing
Aircraft models
Airspeed
Algorithms
Attitudes
automatic flight
Automatic flight control
automatic landing
Automatic landing control
Control algorithms
Control systems
Expert systems
Flight control systems
Fuzzy logic
Hardware-in-the-loop simulation
Image processing
Infrastructure
Landing aids
PAPI lights
Pitch (inclination)
Software
Touchdown
Unmanned aerial vehicles
Vertical orientation
Vision systems
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Summary:The paper presents the concept of a component of an aircraft’s automatic flight control system, controlling the airplane when in longitudinal motion (i.e., pitch angle, sink rate, airspeed channels) during automatic landing, from a final approach until a touchdown. It is composed of two key parts: a vision system and an automatic landing system. The first part exploits dedicated image-processing algorithms to identify the number of red and white PAPI lights appearing on an onboard video camera. Its output data—information about an aircraft’s position on a vertical profile of a landing trajectory—is used as one of the crucial inputs to the automatic landing system (the second part), which uses them to control the landing. The control algorithms implemented by the automatic landing system are based on the fuzzy logic expert system and were developed to imitate the pilot’s control actions during landing an aircraft. These two parts were teamed together as a component of a laboratory rig, first as pure software algorithms only, then as real hardware modules with downloaded algorithms. In two test campaigns (software in the loop and hardware in the loop) they controlled an aircraft model in a simulation environment. Selected results, presenting both control efficiency and flight precision, are given in the final section of the paper.
ISSN:2226-4310
2226-4310
DOI:10.3390/aerospace9060285