Automatic carrier landing for UAV based on integrated disturbance observer and fault-tolerant control

Abstract

Purpose Accurate glide path tracking is vital to the automatic carrier landing task of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The purpose of this paper is to develop a reliable flight controller that can simultaneously deal with external disturbance, structure fault and actuator fault. Design/methodology/approach The automatic carrier landing task is resolved into the glide path tracking problem and attitude tracking problem. The disturbance observer-based adaptive sliding mode control scheme is proposed for system stabilization, disturbance rejection and fault tolerance. Findings Both the Lyapunov method and exemplary simulations can prove that the disturbance estimation error and the attitude tracking error converge in finite time in the presence of external disturbances and various faults. Practical implications The presented algorithm is testified by a UAV automatic carrier landing simulation, which shows the potential of practical usage. Originality/value The barrier function is introduced to adaptively update both the sliding mode observer gain and sliding mode controller gain, so that the sliding mode surface could converge to a predefined region without overestimation. The proposed flight controller ensures a secure carrier landing task.