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Cooperative Control Strategy for an Airplane Landing on a Mobile Target

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Abstract

This paper presents a cooperative control strategy for landing a fixed-wing drone on a mobile target vehicle. The control strategy focuses on guiding the drone along a desired trajectory while the target vehicle’s speed is controlled so that both reach the desired position simultaneously. The system model is composed by the kinematic model of a fixed-wing drone and a ground vehicle. A state feedback control based on Lie derivatives is determined applying the input-output analysis. The system stability is obtained by using Lyapunov stability theory. The proposed control strategy is evaluated in numerical simulations to validate its performance.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was supported by the RPV project - UTC foundation and the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology - CONACyT. We thank the National Laboratory of Autonomous Vehicles and Exoskeletons (LANAVEX) funded by CONACyT.

Funding

Our research work has been financed by the RPV project - UTC foundation and the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology - CONACyT.

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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Analysis, investigation and methodology were performed by Rogelio Lozano, Armando Alatorre and Pedro Castillo. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Armando Alatorre and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Rogelio Lozano.

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Lozano, R., Alatorre, A. & Castillo, P. Cooperative Control Strategy for an Airplane Landing on a Mobile Target. J Intell Robot Syst 107, 1 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-022-01774-2

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