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A simplified approach to assessment of mission success for helicopter landing on a ship

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  • Control Applications
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Abstract

In this paper, operation of a helicopter near a ship is statistically investigated to provide an estimate of the probability of successfully recovering manned rotorcraft on the deck of a moving ship. To this end, pitch, roll, and heave motion of the ship are calculated according to sea states. In addition, effect on dynamics of the rotorcraft from ship airwake is also considered in a simplified way. By assuming that a helicopter can land on a ship if a pilot maintains relative position and attitude difference within the safe boundary for a given time, the operational limits are probabilistically determined in terms of pilot’s workload for a specified mission. The simulation environment consists of linearized helicopter dynamics, an optimal pilot model, effect of turbulent ship airwake, and ship motion. Control activities of the piloted helicopter for position holding with respect to the moving ship are transformed to generalized workload ratings. Simulation results show the proposed approach can evaluate and predict mission success rates for various operational combinations, allowing implementation into the overall effectiveness assessment of the ship and ship-helicopter combination.

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Abbreviations

WOD :

Wind over the Deck

CFD :

Computational Fluid Dynamics

ADS :

Aeronautical Design Standard

HQR :

Handling Quality Rating

MTE :

Mission Task Element

SHOL :

Ship/Helicopter Operating Limit

PSD :

Power Spectral Density

JONSWAP :

Joint North Sea Wave Project

RMS :

Root Mean Square

RPM :

Revolutions Per Minute

OCM :

Optimal Control Model

LQ :

Linear Quadratic

WR :

Workload Rating

CG :

Center of Gravity

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, 30332, USA

    Jongki Moon, Jean Charles Domercant & Dimitri Mavris

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  1. Jongki Moon
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  2. Jean Charles Domercant
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  3. Dimitri Mavris
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jongki Moon.

Additional information

Jongki Moon received his Ph.D. degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta in 2009. He has worked as Postdoctoral fellow at Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory in Georgia Tech. He also earned the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Seoul National University, Korea, in 1998 and 2000, respectively. His research interests include adaptive control, intelligent system, and multi-agent control.

Jean Charles Domercant is Research Faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Aerospace Engineering, where he oversees Defense & Space related research in the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL). He holds a BS in Aerospace Engineering (2000) from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an ME in Engineering Management (2006) from Old Dominion University, an MS in Aerospace Engineering (2008) and a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering (2011) from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests include missile defense, technology portfolio selection, defense acquisitions and decision making, command & control and architecture-based systems-of-systems engineering.

Dimitri Mavris is the Boeing Regents Professor of Advanced Aerospace Systems Analysis at the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the director of its Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL). Under Professor Mavris’ direction, ASDL performs wide-ranging technical research with a focus on the formulation, development and implementation of comprehensive approaches to the design of affordable and high quality complex systems using visual analytics and virtual experimentation. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1984, 1985, and 1988, respectively.

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Moon, J., Domercant, J.C. & Mavris, D. A simplified approach to assessment of mission success for helicopter landing on a ship. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 13, 680–688 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-013-0092-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-013-0092-y

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