Event-triggered adaptive prescribed performance flight-path angle control for aircraft with input deadzone

In this work, we study the tracking control problem for the longitudinal motion of aircraft in the presence of uncertainties and input nonlinearity. Prescribed performance control strategy is utilized to obtain the preset transient and steady-state performance, while the unknown input deadzone is dealt with according to a robust method. Backstepping method is employed to design the adaptive prescribed performance flight-path angle controller, with event-triggered control strategy used to reduce the control and computation expenditures. To alleviate the inherent problem of “explosion of complexity” in backstepping design, two tracking differentiators are constructed to approximate the time derivatives of virtual control laws. The stability of the controlled system is proved by using Lyapunov theory. The tracking error is always restricted within the preset bound during the control process, and ultimately converges to the neighbourhood of origin. Numerical simulation results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed event-triggered prescribed performance flight-path angle control scheme.