Integrated Direct-Lift Prescribed Performance Control for Carrier Landing Under Environmental Disturbances

Abstract

This article proposes an integrated direct-lift-based prescribed performance landing control scheme for carrier-based unmanned aerial vehicles operating in highly disturbed maritime environments. An integrated direct-lift framework is first developed, in which trailing-edge flap deflection directly modulates lift while the elevator compensates the associated pitching moment, enabling efficient decoupling between attitude and flight-path dynamics. To ensure safe and accurate tracking under carrier air-wake turbulence and deck motion, a nonlinear disturbance observer is designed to estimate compound disturbances in real time. Building on the observer, a prescribed performance control law is formulated to guarantee that tracking errors remain strictly within predefined transient- and steady-state bounds while providing robust compensation for residual disturbances. Rigorous Lyapunov analysis establishes uniform ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop system. Comparative simulations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves fast trajectory tracking convergence, reduced actuator workload, and strong robustness. The integrated direct-lift mechanism significantly enhances longitudinal-path responsiveness, and the disturbance-observer-based prescribed performance control ensures high-precision and safety-guaranteed automatic carrier landing even under severe maritime disturbances.