Fault-tolerant control method for carrier landing with actuator and structural faults

Abstract

This paper studies the autonomous carrier landing problem of carrier-based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) under unexpected actuator and structural faults. An adaptive fault-tolerant control method is developed for carrier-based UAV, accounting for both external disturbances and internal faults. Initially, the impacts of unexpected faults on the UAV's physical and aerodynamic characteristics are analyzed, focusing on the loss of actuator efficiency, variations in the inertia matrix, and the generation of additional forces and moments. The effects of wave motion and carrier airwake on the carrier landing process are considered. Subsequently, an automatic landing control system (ALCS) based on the L1 adaptive nonlinear dynamic inversion (L1ANDI) method is proposed to address the challenge of safe landing control under these conditions. The L1ANDI controller combines the nonlinear dynamic inversion (NDI) baseline controller, which addresses known nonlinearities, with the L1 adaptive module to account for unknown nonlinearities introduced by environmental disturbances and UAV faults. The stability of this approach is proven using the Lyapunov function. Finally, comparative simulation experiments are conducted in three scenarios, benchmarking the proposed L1ANDI against NDI and L1 adaptive control, to validate its effectiveness. The results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits superior control performance and robustness to disturbances and uncertainties compared to other methods. These results indicate that the proposed method enables the safe landing of carrier-based UAV under both external disturbances and internal faults.