This article delves into the investigation of attitude control for a tailless flying-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), considering various challenges such as limited communication resources, actuator faults, external disturbances, and system uncertainties. Firstly, an improved event-triggered mechanism is developed, which significantly reduces the communication and computation resources. Subsequently, an event-triggered adaptive fuzzy fixed-time fault-tolerant control scheme is presented by combining backstepping design. The presented control scheme not only mitigates control system chattering but also eliminates potential singularity issues that may arise during recursive design. It is rigorously demonstrated that the designed controller guarantees all states of the closed-loop attitude control system remain bounded and will converge to a small neighborhood adjacent to the origin in fixed time, regardless of the initial conditions, while excluding Zeno behavior. Finally, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed control methodology are shown through the comparative numerical simulations.

This study introduces a novel adaptive fuzzy fault-tolerant controller designed for tailless aircraft's attitude tracking problem, even in the absence of angular velocity measurements. The controller addresses challenges posed by external disturbances, model uncertainties, and actuator faults. Initially, we propose a fixed-time sliding mode differentiator to estimate unmeasured angular velocity. Model uncertainties and external disturbances are approximated using fuzzy logic systems. Subsequently, a nonsingular fixed-time adaptive fuzzy fault-tolerant control scheme is developed based on the backstepping theory, which actively mitigates the impact of actuator faults, resulting in superior attitude tracking performance. The theoretical foundation of the proposed control scheme guarantees the boundedness and convergence of all closed-loop attitude control system states to a confined region around the origin within a fixed time. Notably, this convergence is achieved regardless of initial errors. Finally, simulation examples are presented to verify the effectiveness of the estimator and controller.

This work develops a morphing decision strategy to optimize the cruising efficiency for a variable-sweep morphing aircraft, and a simple and practical guidance and control system is given as well. They can work in tandem to accomplish a cruise mission effectively. To make the morphing decision accurately, we take into account the equilibrium equations of forces; the variations in airspeed, altitude, and mass and the optimal configurations for different cruise conditions are solved based on the nonlinear programming method with the objective of minimum engine thrust. Considering that a large amount of computational resources are required to solve the nonlinear programming problems, we establish an offline database of the optimal configurations and design a database-based online morphing decision process. In addition, the proposed morphing decision strategy includes an anti-disturbance mechanism, which ensures that the optimal configuration can be given accurately without chattering under fluctuating airspeed measurements. Comparative results from the simulations finally validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.