Prescribed performance control for automatic carrier landing with disturbance

This paper presents a novel automatic carrier landing controller which holds a constant angle of attack during final approach with prescribed performance in the presence of external disturbances and carrier deck motion. Based on the nonlinear model of the aircraft, backstepping technique is adopted as the main control frame. To improve the stability during final approach, a novel control structure which maintains a constant angle of attack is proposed. By using performance constrained guidance law, the proposed controller is capable of guaranteeing trajectory tracking errors within prescribed performance, which means that the tracking errors are confined within prescribed convergence rates and maximum overshoots. Moreover, considering the deck motion of the carrier and inherent phase lag of the aircraft, deck motion compensation is included. Furthermore, nonlinear disturbance observers are introduced to eliminate the affects of unknown disturbances, while command filters are employed as well, avoiding complicated computations for time derivatives of virtual controls. Finally, simulation results clarify and verify the proposed control scheme.