A sliding mode control design for aircraft rendezvous at meter fix

Abstract

International audience; The delegation to the flight crew of some tasks currently performed by air traffic controllers provides new perspectives to potentially increase air traffic control efficiency. More specifically, the task of establishing properly spaced landing sequences is very demanding in heavy traffic conditions for the air traffic controllers in charge of the terminal manoeuvring area. Automatic merging and station keeping operations could relieve air traffic controller of providing time consuming radar vectoring instructions. The objective of this communication is to provide technical insight into the airborne devices and algorithms which may be used onboard aircraft to automatically achieve a specified distance or delay with respect to another aircraft at a specified meter fix. A nonlinear control law based on sliding mode control is proposed to control the lateral motion of the trailing aircraft. The design is followed by two illustrative examples which show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.