Propulsion-only Control for High-Altitude Long-Endurance Aircraft Using Sliding Mode

This paper explores the feasibility of using a propulsion-only control scheme for a high-altitude long-endurance UAV. This approach enables aircraft to operate even in the face of total control surface failures. A sliding mode scheme is used for the control law due to its invariance to matched uncertainty, and the reduced control authority is accommodated via a model-reference method. Similar performance compared to the fault-free case has been achieved in terms of following altitude and heading commands, in a numerical simulation using a 6-DOF nonlinear model.