Disturbance observer based exponential time-varying sliding mode flight control design for cruise vehicle

As a cruise vehicle is characterized by quickly time-varying, strongly coupled and highly nonlinear, a accurate and robust control strategy is proposed for the cruise vehicle flight control in the presence of aerodynamic parameter and inertial parameter uncertainties. A disturbance observer based exponential time-varying sliding mode control (DOETVSMC) strategy is developed the for cruise vehicle by combining the disturbance observer method and exponential time-varying sliding mode control (ETVSMC) approach, and the related stability of the overall controller is further analyzed by using Lyapunov stability principle. As a result, the proposed approach can be used to effectively reduce the steady state error caused by the boundary layer approach used to process the chattering problem in the sliding mode control (SMC). Finally, simulations are employed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.