Disturbance Observer-Based Dynamic Surface Control of Transport Aircraft with Continuous Heavy Cargo Airdrop

This paper investigates the dynamic surface control of nonlinear transport aircraft model during the process of continuous heavy cargo airdrop in case of disturbance and actuator saturation. For the continuous airdrop process, the effects of moving process parameters include cargo mass and moving items upon the flight and the aircraft dynamics is with dramatic change. The dynamic surface related technique is designed for the attitude subsystem with unmatched disturbance and unknown dynamics so that in each step the virtual control is carefully considered using disturbance observer while the auxiliary signal is constructed in case of actuator saturation. The closed-loop stability is established via Lyapunov approach. In simulation test, it is interesting to find out that continuous airdrop process will deteriorate the system stability if additional control effort is not exerted. The proposed disturbance observer-based control can effectively enhance the reliability and robustness of the system, and can make sure of the smooth system performance at the instant of the heavy cargo separating from the aircraft.