Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Finite-Time Flight-Path Angle Control for Aircraft Systems With Unknown Deadzone and Actuator Faults

This study focuses on fault-tolerant finite-time flight-path angle control for an aircraft in the presence of external disturbances, unknown deadzone and actuator fault. To begin with, the longitudinal model of aircraft is introduced for the subsequent controller design. Then, a new smooth deadzone inverse model is presented to compensate for the deadzone nonlinearity in aircraft system. A robust adaptive fault-tolerant finite-time control law is derived by using backstepping adaptive control approach, where a finite-time stability criterion is adopted for developing practical finite-time control. In order to reduce the difficulty of control system design, two finite-time differentiators are used to estimate the derivatives of virtual control signals. The coupling errors of the deadzone and faults are properly dealt with by estimating the unknown bounds. Finally, comparative numerical simulation results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed fault-tolerant finite-time flight-path angle control scheme.