Landing control design for a VTOL aircraft

Abstract

This study investigates the problem of forcing a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft to land on a carrier. Once we obtain the tracking error system, we take the strategies such as preliminarily treating a two-dimensional subsystem, recombining subsystems, separating out a converging term, and using the ‘converging input converging state (CICS)’ stability theory. As a consequence, we only need to stabilise a fourth-order integrator that is subject to a bounded uncertain coefficient. Then, we assign a partially-saturated controller to deal with the perturbed fourth-order integrator and particularly the uncertain coefficient. With the suggested algorithm, the carrier is allowed to evolve in three dimensions and the landing control design has a simple expression.