Estimation of wind field velocity and aircraft states with an F-16 lateral guidance control system

Bearing in mind the risks aviation industry is facing recently, this paper proposes a wind field estimation formulation for an F-16 fighter aircraft. Focus of the work is two-fold. A lateral-directional, non-linear guidance controller is developed first to ensure tight ground track control without violating saturation limits of bank angles. For trajectory tracking, path following vectorial computations are performed for both straight and curved tracks in North-East-Down (NED) as well as in Earth-Centred-Earth-Fixed (ECEF) reference coordinate systems. Furthermore, for the wind field estimation based on generated flight data and a Frozen Dryden Wind Turbulence Model, a Discrete-Time Kalman Filter (DKF) is employed. Simulations are run for real flight scenarios with noisy sensors and gust winds. The simulation analysis highlights the effectiveness of the proposed technique in comparison to the conventional direct method estimation used for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It is also shown that the suggested method is capable of providing smoothed estimates for the aircraft attitude states and sideslip angle.