Sliding Mode Disturbance Observer-Based Adaptive Dynamic Inversion Fault-Tolerant Control for Fixed-Wing UAV

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely applied over the past decades, especially in the military field. Due to the unpredictability of the flight environment and failures, higher requirements are placed on the design of the control system of the fixed-wing UAV. In this study, a sliding mode disturbance observer-based (SMDO) adaptive dynamic inversion fault-tolerant controller was designed, which includes an outer-loop sliding mode observer-based disturbance suppression dynamic inversion controller and an inner-loop real-time aerodynamic identification-based adaptive fault-tolerant dynamic inversion controller. The sliding mode disturbance observer in the outer-loop controller was designed based on the second-order super-twisting algorithm to alleviate chattering. The aerodynamic identification in the inner-loop controller adopts the recursive least squares algorithm to update the aerodynamic model of the UAV online, thereby realizing the fault-tolerant control for the control surface damage. The effectiveness of the proposed SMDO enhanced adaptive fault-tolerant control method was validated by mathematical simulation