Incremental fault-tolerant control with adjustable predefined-time strategy for unilateral wing-damaged aircraft

This paper first analyzes the impact of unilateral wing loss on aircraft dynamics and establishes a high-precision nonlinear model for such a damaged aircraft. To guarantee the safety of the damaged aircraft, an adjustable predefined-time incremental fault-tolerant control scheme integrated with overload feedback and a predefined-time sliding mode observer is then proposed. The proposed control scheme guarantees that the damaged aircraft recovers to a stable state within the appropriate user-defined time. Importantly, the proposed adjustable predefined-time scheme effectively resolves the mismatch between recovery time and recovery dynamics of the damaged aircraft. Additionally, another key feature of the proposed control scheme is the capability to estimate the disturbance in the measurement of the angular acceleration, thus avoiding the robustness degradation. Finally, theoretical analysis rigorously proves the predefined-time stability of the closed-loop system, and extensive real-time simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the developed fault-tolerant controller.