Disturbance-Observer-Based Prescribed Performance Fault-Tolerant Control Design and Flight Test for Carrier-Based UAV

A carrier-based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is prone to faults during missions, leading to abrupt changes in flight dynamic and increasing the difficulty of landing. To address this, this article proposes a fault-tolerant carrier landing control method with fixed-time convergence and prescribed performance abilities. This method integrates a fault disturbance observer and a prescribed performance controller. The fault disturbance observer estimates and compensates for disturbances caused by faults, enhancing fault tolerance. Meanwhile, the prescribed performance controller ensures that the attitude tracking error remains within predefined bounds despite disturbances, ensuring safe landing. A carrier landing control system based on this method is developed for automatic carrier landing tasks. Numerical simulation tests demonstrate that the proposed control scheme can achieve precise and rapid landing control even with elevator bias and the aileron partial loss faults. Finally, by using a simulated wingtip damage mechanism to induce faults, real flight tests are carried out. The flight test results demonstrate that the UAV maintains stable attitude and trajectory tracking despite the presence of faults, further verifying the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method, establishing a foundation for future practical engineering applications.