Model-following sliding mode controller design for flight control systems with wind disturbances

Based on the model following control method, a sliding mode controller is designed for the flight control system with wind disturbances. With this controller, the controlled plant can track the reference model outputs precisely. It is shown that this scheme provides better performance for the flight control system with uncertain disturbances. In this paper, we employ the advantages of the model following and sliding-mode control. A sliding surface is designed through a modified linear quadratic regulator method to make the sliding mode have good dynamic characteristics and to eliminate the steady state error. The nonlinear control structure of sliding mode control with model following controller shows high robustness to model uncertainty and external wind disturbances. The simulation results show that the flight control system using this controller not only reduce the chattering, but also achieves satisfactory model following performance.