The class of vehicles that can move both in the air and underwater has been of great interest for decades. A novel water-air unmanned vehicle with double quadrotor structure is designed in this study. The air power mechanism works when the vehicle flies in the air, whereas the water power mechanism works when it moves underwater. The water entry process of water-air unmanned vehicle requires accurate attitude and height control, or the vehicle may bounce off or overturn. However, a force resisting its descent known as in-ground effect will affect its stability. The in-ground effect formula of the water entry process is derived by experiments, and the water entry dynamic model is improved at the same time. An active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) is designed for the control of water entry attitude and height. Experimental results obtained from the comparison of the ADRC and a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller show that the ADRC designed in this study is more robust than the PID controller for the internal coupling and external disturbance on the vehicle. Moreover, the ADRC can meet the requirements of rapid attitude adjustment and accurate height control.

In this paper, we address the problem of altitude and velocity controllers design for variable-sweep aircraft with model uncertainties. The object is to maintain altitude and velocity during the wing transition process where mass distribution and aerodynamic parameters change significantly. Based on the functional decomposition, the longitudinal dynamics of the aircraft can be divided into altitude subsystem in non-affine pure feedback form and velocity subsystem. And then nonlinear robust adaptive NN velocity controller and altitude controller are designed with backstepping method to relax the prior requirements of aerodynamic parameters accuracy in linear LPV controller design. The method of filtered signal is used to circumvent the algebraic loop problem caused by the dynamics of non-affine pure feedback form. Dynamic surface control (DSC) and minimal learning parameters (MLP) techniques are employed to solve the problems of 'explosion of complexity' in the back-stepping method and the online updated parameters being too much. The robust terms have been introduced to eliminate the influences of approximation errors. According to the Lyapunov-LaSalle invariant set theorem, the semi-global boundedness and convergence of all the signals of the closed-loop system are proved. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the control algorithm with good performance.