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ANZIAM J. 47(EMAC2005) pp.C695--C711, 2007.

Optimal three dimensional aircraft terrain following and collision avoidance

T. Sharma

P. Williams

C. Bil

A. Eberhard

(Received 16 March 2006, revised 15 April 2007)

Abstract

Military aircraft must often fly in close proximity to terrain. In this article, optimal terrain following is considered as a minimax optimal control problem, which is solved using direct transcription of the continuous optimal control problem. Within a very general framework for solving such problems, we transform the nonsmooth cost function into a constrained nonlinear programming problem. In the formulation, we solve for optimal collision avoidance manoeuvres. To ensure smooth derivatives of general three dimensional terrain, it is approximated using B-splines. A receding horizon tracking controller tracks the optimal trajectories with disturbances to the aircraft model and initial conditions.

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Authors

T. Sharma

School of Aerospace, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Engineering, RMIT University, Bundoora, Australia. mailto:S3075886@student.rmit.edu.au

P. Williams

School of Aerospace, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Engineering, RMIT University, Bundoora, Australia. mailto:paul.williams@rmit.edu.au

C. Bil

Sir Lawrence Wackett Centre, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

A. Eberhard

Department of Mathematics, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

Published June 26, 2007. ISSN 1446-8735

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