Predefined-time sliding manifold-based fixed-time attitude stabilization control of receiver aircraft with measurement noises

This paper investigates the challenging attitude stabilization control problem of receiver aircraft subject to uncertain and time-varying inertia, and wind disturbances in the aerial refueling task. An adaptive fixed-time control strategy is proposed. In this approach, a predefined-time sliding manifold is preliminarily developed. The main feature is that the settling time is not only independent of initial conditions but also can be simply and explicitly defined in advance through a single parameter in the sliding mode phase. On this basis, an adaptive control law is developed to guarantee that the trajectory of attitude can be stabilized into a small region containing the origin. The upper bound of unknown disturbance is not required to implement the proposed controller, which relaxes the restrictions of design for control systems. Moreover, the measuring noises are explicitly considered and addressed to make this approach still available in the noisy measurement environment. The Lyapunov stability analysis and numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.