Fuzzy Logic Based Approach to Design of Autonomous Landing System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper is concerned with autonomous flight of UAVs and proposes a fuzzy logic based autonomous flight and landing system controller. Besides three fuzzy logic controllers which are developed for autonomous navigation for UAVs in a previous work as fuzzy logic based autonomous mission control blocks, three more fuzzy logic modules are developed under the main landing system for the control of the horizontal and the vertical positions of the aircraft against the runway under a TACAN (Tactical Air Navigation) approach. The performance of the fuzzy logic based controllers is evaluated using the standard configuration of MATLAB and the Aerosim Aeronautical Simulation Block Set which provides a complete set of tools for rapid development of 6 degree-of-freedom nonlinear generic manned/unmanned aerial vehicle models. Additionally, FlightGear Flight Simulator and GMS aircraft instruments are deployed in order to get visual outputs that aid the designer in evaluating the performance and the potential of the controllers. The simulated test flights on an Aerosonde indicate the capability of the approach in achieving the desired performance despite the simple design procedure.