Attitude Control of Aircraft Using Only Synthetic Jet Actuators When Stall Occurs

This paper proposes a novel active flow control method for a special aircraft, that using only synthetic jet actuators (SJAs) to achieve pitch-roll-yaw attitude control at a high angle of attack when the stall occurs. The special aircraft goes without traditional aileron, elevator, or vertical stabilizer. As the first step, the model of the aircraft is built and the relation between the velocity amplitude of SJAs and the moments provided by SJAs are derived. The next step, to solve the problem that parameter uncertainties, unmodeled dynamics, and unknown external disturbances exist in the aircraft system, a sliding mode controller base on extended state observer (ESO) is designed. The parameter uncertainties, unmodeled dynamics, and unknown external disturbances are regarded as the compound interference of the system, which is estimated by the ESO and compensated in real time. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed controller is verified through the numerical simulations. Simulation results show that the proposed control method is feasible and effective to solve the difficult problem of attitude control when the stall occurs.