Direct Lift Control for Carrier-based Aircraft with Predefined-Time Incremental Strategy

Aiming at the issue of disturbance affecting carrier landing, this paper proposes an incremental nonlinear control-based direct lift control technology with a predefined-time property to improve the landing accuracy of carrier-based aircraft. Firstly, the mechanism and advantages of the direct lift control strategy for carrier landings are analyzed from an aerodynamic perspective. Then, a predefined-time-based incremental control approach is proposed and applied to design the automatic carrier landing system with direct lift control, which addresses the issue of uncertainty in the convergence time of the existing landing systems. Importantly, a disturbance observer with predefined-time stability and a noise rejection filter are proposed to eliminate radar measurement disturbances. By employing the Lyapunov method, it is demonstrated that the designed landing system can ensure the altitude tracking error converges to a small region within a user-defined time. Finally, real-time simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed landing system and its superiority compared to existing studies.