Backstepping Fault-Tolerant Control for Unmanned Thrust-Vectoring Aircraft Based on Sliding-Mode Observer

Abstract

In this paper, a backstepping fault-tolerant control based on sliding-mode observer is proposed for the unmanned thrust-vectoring aircraft (UTVA) control. First, the UTVA model with the uncertainty, control surface damage and actuator faults is described, which is divided into fast loop and slow loop. Next, the cascade observers including a high-order SMO and the discontinuous projection adaptive law are proposed to estimate the states with compensating the uncertainty and control surface damage, and the sliding-mode observer is designed to identify actuator faults and estimate fault parameters. Then, the backstepping fault-tolerant control combining the estimation of states and fault parameters is proposed to achieve the global fault-tolerant control, which compensates the uncertainty, control surface damage and actuator faults. Finally, simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness for UTVA.