Observer-based backstepping longitudinal control for carrier-based UAV with actuator faults

The paper presents the longitudinal control for the carrier-based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system with unmeasured states, actuator faults, control input constraints, and external disturbances. By combining output state observer, adaptive fuzzy control, and constraint backstepping technology, a robust fault tolerant control approach is proposed. An output state observer with fuzzy logic systems is developed to estimate unmeasured states, and command filters rather than differentiations of virtual control law are used to solve the computational complexity problem in traditional backstepping. Additionally, a robust term is introduced to offset the fuzzy adaptive estimation error and external disturbance, and an appropriate fault controller structure with matching conditions obtained from fault compensation is proposed. Based on the Lyapunov theory, the designed control program is illustrated to guarantee that all the closed-loop signals of the given system are bounded, and the output errors converge to a small neighborhood of zero. A carrier-based UAV nonlinear longitudinal model is employed to testify the feasibility and validity of the control scheme. The simulation results show that all the controllers can perform at a satisfactory level of reference tracking despite the existence of unknown aerodynamic parameters and actuator faults.