Summary
This paper proposes an adaptive controller for the trajectory tracking problem of vertical take‐off and landing unmanned aerial vehicles with unknown inertia and gyro‐bias, in the presence of external disturbances and actuator loss of effectiveness. To achieve our control objective, first, an a priori bounded virtual control law, providing an a priori bounded thrust and desired attitude, is designed for the translational dynamics. Thereafter, the torque input is designed for the rotational dynamics to track the desired orientation derived in the first stage. The stability of the overall hierarchical closed‐loop system and the global convergence of the tracking errors to zero are rigorously established. Finally, numerical simulations are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.