Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) often need to take off and land under complex working conditions. The rugged terrains may cause the UAV to tilt during takeoff and landing and even cause rollover and other accidents in severe cases. In this paper, a new four-legged landing gear of multirotor UAVs with a passive cushioning structure is designed, aiming at the landing stability requirement of rotorcraft UAVs in complex terrains. The mathematical model of the landing gear dynamics is established in MATLAB/Simulink, and the drop test simulation is carried out under different landing terrain conditions. By comparing the simulation results of the drop test multibody dynamic model in Simcenter3D dynamics software, the adaptive landing and cushioning capacity of the landing gear and the accuracy of the mathematical model are verified. Combined with the landing stability criterion and control strategy of adaptive landing gear adjustment, the landing stability of adaptive landing gear under different slope angles of landing surface and horizontal velocities is studied. The landing stability boundary under different combinations of these two parameters is found.

During aircraft braking, the change of ground adhesion forces can cause forward and backward vibration of the landing gear, and the performance of the brake disc may exacerbate this vibration. In order to solve this problem, a rigid–flexible coupling dynamic model of a two-wheel strut landing gear considering the friction characters of brake discs with different materials and a hydraulic brake system model is established in this paper. The brake disc friction characteristics effect on the low-frequency brake-induced vibration of the landing gear given different brake disc materials and ambient temperatures is studied. It is shown that the C/SiC brake disc has a “negative slope” phenomenon between the friction coefficient of the brake disc and the wheel speed, and this variable friction characteristic has a great effect on the low-frequency braking-induced vibration of the landing gear. In addition, the variable friction characteristics of the C/SiC brake disc are easily affected by ambient temperature, while the friction coefficient of the C/C brake disc changes stably.

Directional stability during the roll-out phase is crucial to the safety and reusability of the aircraft. Because of the mechanical properties, the wheel-skid aircraft is more prone to produce course instability. To address this issue, the taxiing safe set of the wheel-skid aircraft is discussed based on the reachability theory. A dynamic model of the on-ground aircraft is established firstly, considering the complex condition of the ground loads. Then, the particular Hamilton–Jacobi partial differential equation is used to obtain the safe set. According to the safe set results, the optimal control of the rudder is built in the state space. Its effectiveness is verified by the comparison with other robust methods. In addition, three structural parameters are selected to analyze the influences on the safe set. Results indicate that the maximum safe yaw angle increases from $1°$ to $9°$ at 70 m/s under the optimal control of the rudder when the steering of nose wheel is locked. The safe boundary in the middle–high-speed region expands by 43.5% under the rudder control. Because of the mechanical properties, uncontrollable deflection will appear due to the asymmetric disturbances when the longitudinal velocity is lower than 42 m/s.

The paper deals with straight-line path-following control design for the aircraft equipped with skid landing gears. First, a simple yet accurate on-ground aircraft model is established, which takes into account the effects of the aerodynamic and ground forces. To improve the directional stability of the aircraft during the roll-out phase, a novel skid with variable friction coefficients is proposed. Second, the path-following problem is converted to the attitude control problem by constructing a guiding vector field that generates the commanded course, and then an improved error function is proposed to manage the trade-off between the convergence rate and the strong lateral maneuvers. To achieve a good performance in path following, the incremental nonlinear control allocation is applied to make full use of three available actuators (nose wheel, variable friction skid, and rudder). The expected path here is the runway centerline so as to avoid runway excursions. Finally, the effectiveness and robustness of the path-following control are validated on different initial conditions. Results show that the proposed skid structure and control scheme are propitious to enhancing the resistance to crosswind. Moreover, the maximum lateral displacement during the path-following process decreases, especially in the low-speed region.