A Design of Model Predictive Control and Nonlinear Disturbance Observer-based Backstepping Sliding Mode Control for Terrain Following

In this study, we propose the terrain following algorithm using model predictive control and nonlinear disturbance observer-based backstepping sliding mode controller for an aircraft system. Terrain following is important for military missions because it helps the aircraft avoid detection by the enemy radar. The model predictive control is used to replace the generating trajectory and guidance with the flight path angle constraint. In addition, the aircraft is affected to the parameter uncertainty and unknown disturbance such as wind near the mountainous terrain. Therefore, we suggest the nonlinear disturbance-based backstepping sliding mode control method for the aircraft that has highly nonlinearity to enhance flight path angle tracking performance. Through the numerical simulation, the proposed method showed the better tracking performance than the traditional backstepping method. Furthermore, the proposed method presented the terrain following maneuver maintaining the desired altitude.