Non-singular terminal sliding mode control for structural damaged aircraft

Structural damage will cause a sudden variation of aircraft´s quality, center of gravity and aerodynamic characteristics, as well as the destruction of longitudinal symmetry, thus bringing strong coupling. These pose serious threat to flight security. The present paper studies a kind of damaged aircrafts by presenting the nonlinear 6-DOF model of structural damaged aircraft and analyzing its dynamic characteristics. And then an attitude controller based on Non-singular terminal sliding mode control is designed, which control the damaged aircraft effectively. Finally NASA Generic Transport Model (GTM) is taken as an example to validate the controller under the typical case of right wing tip with 15% damage. Simulation results show that the non-singular terminal sliding mode exhibits good performance on control capability. And the controller has strong robustness and adaptability to mutation of aircraft. Moreover, the outputs track the control commands quickly and accurately.