Fundamental Experiments on Stopping Control of a Scaled Model Propeller Aircraft Using Double-Fan Propulsion System

Abstract

The motion of ships and aircraft is governed by inertia and hydrodynamic or aerodynamic forces, so they do not stop immediately even when reverse thrust is applied. Consequently, operations such as maneuvering in harbors and landing require control that can decelerate and stop accurately near a target position, yet full-scale testing can be costly and constrained by safety. This study uses a small wheeled model equipped with two coaxial propellers forming an independently actuated doublefan propulsion system and examines stopping control experimentally. Position is estimated from an overhead camera by detecting a red marker on the vehicle and computing its centroid. Manual control, proportional position control, fixed reversethrust commands, and reference-velocity-based control using velocity feedback were compared. In Experiment 1, fixed reversecommand levels were varied to characterize stopping behavior. In Experiment 2, a single operator controlled the forward thruster while position-based reverse thrust was applied automatically. In Experiment 3, a reference velocity profile obtained from successful manual runs was used for velocity-based control. The results show that fixed reverse thrust can change stopping accuracy and trajectory dispersion depending on the command level, while the reference-velocity-based controller reduced the average stopping-position overshoot from approximately 9 mm to 3 mm under the tested conditions. The contribution of this study is not a new derivative-control law, but an experimental characterization of independently actuated forward/reverse fan control and the application of a reference-velocity-based stopping strategy to this specific double-fan platform. The results are limited to the tested small-scale model and are not intended as a quantitative prediction of full-scale aircraft behavior.