Research on the control of thrust vectoring turbojet aircraft with uncertainties and input saturation based on fixed‐time control

Abstract One‐dimensional thrust vectoring turbojet vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft have attracted research attention due to their high thrust‐to‐weight ratios and their solution for the slow speed response of turbojet engines. However, there are some uncertainties and physical limitations in their systems, such as external disturbances, unknown parameters and input saturation. To improve the accuracy and convergence speed of trajectory tracking, a fixed‐time control method that is robust to saturation is proposed. The system dynamics are established, and an auxiliary system is built within a fixed time control framework to address the influence of input saturation and increase the error convergence rate. Nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode technology is combined with a few adaptive laws to ensure the robustness of the closed‐loop system against dynamic uncertainties and improve the precision of steady‐state control. The stability of the control system is proven based on Lyapunov, and the controller parameters are optimized based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). The proposed method based on fixed‐time stability guarantees that the states of the closed‐loop system can reach the residual set around zero within the designed time, and an expression for the upper bound on the convergence time is given. Finally, numerical simulations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method based on the error integral criterion.