Path Planning for Aircraft Fleet Launching on the Flight Deck of Carriers

This paper studies the path planning problem for aircraft fleet taxiing on the flight deck of carriers, which is of great significance for improving the safety and efficiency level of launching. As there are various defects of manual command in the flight deck operation of carriers, the establishment of an automatic path planner for aircraft fleets is imperative. The requirements of launching, the particularities of the flight deck environment, the way of launch, and the work mode of catapult were analyzed. On this basis, a mathematical model was established which contains the constraints of maneuverability and the work mode of catapults; the ground motion and collision detection of aircraft are also taken into account. In the design of path planning algorithm, path tracking was combined with path planning, and the strategy of rolling optimization was applied to get the actual taxi path of each aircraft. Taking the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier as an example, the taxi paths of aircraft fleet launching was planned with the proposed method. This research can guarantee that the aircraft fleet complete launching missions safely with reasonable taxi paths.