Sliding mode disturbance observer-based backstepping control for a transport aircraft

This paper presents a novel control method by integrating the sliding mode disturbance observer-based control and the backstepping control technique, and successfully applies it to a flight control system for heavy cargo airdrop operations. The super-twisting second order sliding mode disturbance observer (SOSMDO) is employed to estimate bounded but otherwise arbitrary disturbances, thus ensuring asymptotic convergence of the estimation error to zero in a finite time. Besides, the integrated controller can significantly improve the robustness of the flight control system to modeling uncertainty and external disturbance in the presence of state/control constraints. The closed-loop stability is guaranteed in the sense of Lyapunov. In addition, the proposed approach can considerably reduce design cycles. The performance of the proposed control method is demonstrated in a very low altitude extraction airdrop simulation with a high-fidelity six-degree-of-freedom transport aircraft model.