Automatic Landing System Design for Unmanned Fixed-Wing Vehicles via Multivariable Active Disturbance Rejection Control

Landing control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is challenging because of the strong nonlinear dynamics, multivariable, model uncertainties, wind variations, and sensor noise. Motivated by this fact, this paper investigates an automatic landing system (ALS) that includes trajectory generation and guidance law for the first flight test of a turbine-based combined cycle technology demonstrator. Specifically, the control scheme increases the original model’s order to generate a reasonable monotone-decreasing throttle reference flare trajectory by the pseudospectral method. Subsequently, the guidance law based on innovative multivariable active disturbance rejection control is designed to robustly track the reference altitude and velocity simultaneously with high accuracy. The multivariable extended state observer (ESO) incorporated decoupling algorithm enhances the estimation capability and accuracy of potential problem in cross-coupling dynamics compared to the traditional ESO. It is proven that the closed-loop error dynamic has bounded-input bounded-output stability and an explicit upper bound is given. Numerical simulation verifies that the presented approach has better robustness and higher tracking accuracy for external disturbances and parametric uncertainties than the existing benchmark autolanding controller. Finally, flight tests show that the proposed ALS can land the vehicle effectively and safely under severe wind conditions.