Coordinated Trajectory and Attitude Control for Fixed-Wing AAV Shipboard SideArm Recovery With Safety Constraints

The precise docking of fixed-wing autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs) onto shipboard recovery systems faces significant control challenges due to dynamic environmental disturbances and the relative motion between the SideArm and AAVs. This article presents a constraint-based control framework for AAV docking under irregular ship motions, ensuring seamless trajectory–attitude coordination with the arresting cable and SideArm’s rail. To achieve this, a flexible docking-aware prescribed performance control method is developed to maintain the AAV’s position and attitude within predefined constraints throughout the docking process, thereby enhancing docking accuracy. Furthermore, to mitigate the issue of flight-envelope exceedance caused by motion compensation during AAV approach, an adaptive adjustment envelope mechanism is proposed. An unknown system dynamic estimator is also established to estimate the lumped external perturbations, augmenting the controller with feedforward compensation to enhance the AAV’s disturbance rejection capabilities. Finally, numerical simulations under varying sea state conditions verify that the proposed method improves docking accuracy and robustness.