A Novel Disturbance Estimator-Enhanced Predictive Control Approach for Landing Planar Movement Control of Amphibious Airplanes

This paper investigates the landing planar movement control (LPMC) problem of an amphibious airplane which is susceptible to uncertainties such as the gust, the unmodeled dynamics and the strong couplings. The uncertainties can bring negative effects for the airplane acting in forms of persistent influences and sudden changes, damaging system stability and causing rollover. To attenuate the persistent disturbances, an entirely novel disturbance estimator that can estimate the non-smooth disturbances accurately is designed. To degrade the impacts from sudden changes, a type of predictive controller is developed such that input surging can be suppressed. Comparison with the conventional PID method shows that the proposed approach enables the system good robustness in attenuating both persistent disturbances and sudden changes during the LPMC.