Controls for a nonlinear system arising in vision-based landing of airliners

We use a novel backstepping method to solve a stabilization problem for a nonlinear system with delayed sampled outputs that are not accurately measured. We provide an application to a system arising in vision-based landing of airliners that includes coupling between the lateral and longitudinal dynamics, for which we provide performance guarantees in the presence of the delay, nonlinearity, and sampling. Our major contributions are (a) designs of lateral and longitudinal controls for our nonlinear model of an aircraft landing on an unequipped runway, (b) mathematical proofs that our controls ensure that the aircraft being modeled achieves desired alignment with the runway during its align phase, under sampling and delays that arise from image processing of visual information, and (c) comparative simulations exhibiting considerable improvement in control performance compared with previous methods that did not take the coupling of the dynamics or imprecise delayed sampled measurements into account.