A Sliding Mode Control with Optimized Sliding Surface for Aircraft Pitch Axis Control System

A sliding mode controller with an optimized sliding surface is proposed for an aircraft control system. The quadratic type of performance index for minimizing the angle of attack and the angular rate of the aircraft in the longitudinal motion is used to design the sliding surface. For optimization of the sliding surface, a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation is formulated and it is solved through a numerical algorithm using a Generalized HJB (GHJB) equation and the Galerkin spectral method. The solution of this equation denotes a nonlinear sliding surface, on which the trajectory of the system approximately satisfies the optimality condition. Numerical simulation is performed for a nonlinear aircraft model with an optimized sliding surface and a simple linear sliding surface. The simulation result demonstrates that the proposed controller can be effectively applied to the longitudinal maneuver of an aircraft.