Prescribed-Time Fault-Tolerant Flight Control for Aircraft Subject to Structural Damage

This article investigates the attitude tracking fault-tolerant control for structurally damaged aircraft based on prescribed-time theory. A prescribed-time-based hybrid backstepping fault-tolerant control approach is proposed to address unilateral wing damage and multiple actuator faults. The prescribed-time-based extended state observer is proposed to solve the problem caused by angular acceleration disturbances destroying robustness. Meanwhile, the “explosion of complexity” problem is effectively avoided by the introduction of a prescribed-time-based filter. Importantly, the tracking error and the disturbance estimation error are rigorously demonstrated to converge to a small region around zero within a user-defined time, and this convergence time is not affected by controller parameters or initial states. Finally, simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed attitude tracking fault-tolerant control algorithm.