Automatic Carrier Landing Control With External Disturbance and Input Constraint

In this article, the automatic carrier landing problem of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is studied, where external disturbance and input constraint are considered. Deck motion prediction is necessary in classical automatic carrier landing system (ACLS), which is difficult to compensate precisely due to the motion is primarily stochastic. Thus, a relative motion model between the UAV and ideal glide path is established, by which the disturbance of the wave to the carrier is regarded as external disturbance to the model as well as the airwake to the UAV, and the problem of trajectory tracking is transformed into a stabilization problem. Moreover, nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode observer is designed to estimate disturbance, and it is proved that observed error can converge to residual in fixed time. In addition, an ACLS based on backstepping control structure is proposed, where input constraint is considered, and the closed-loop control system is proved to be stable by the Lyapunov function. Finally, numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate reliability and superiority of the proposed ACLS.