Attitude and height tracking control of unmanned helicopters with disturbances via disturbance observer-based composite dynamic surface control

Abstract

In this paper, the attitude and height tracking control problem is studied for unmanned helicopters with disturbances. To solve the problem, a composite control scheme is proposed based on the combination of dynamic surface control and disturbance observer-based control techniques. The control design includes two parts. In the first part, some nonlinear disturbance observers are designed to accurately estimate the helicopter’s disturbances in different channels. In the second part, based on the disturbance estimates and dynamic surface control technique, a composite dynamic surface tracking controller is designed. Under the proposed composite controller, the attitude and height tracking errors are uniformly ultimately bounded and they can be regulated to be very small by selecting proper controller parameters. For one thing, the proposed control scheme avoids “explosion of terms”, which generally exists in conventional backstepping control and provides a simpler control design. For another thing, without sacrificing the nominal control performances, the anti-disturbance ability of the closed-loop helicopter system is enhanced by using disturbance observers and feedforward compensations. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed composite tracking controller.

Trajectory tracking control based on prescribed performance and fractional-order state observer for unmanned helicopters with unmeasurable states

“…For instance, in 16 , the generalized PI observer and the backstepping control were integrated to come up with a feedforward-feedback compound control scheme. A compound control approach was explored by the synthesis of harmonic disturbance observer and the backstepping control for the tracking control of UAH in 17 . In 18 , the backstepping control was employed to inquire into an adaptive anti-disturbance fault-tolerant control scheme for the UAH model subject to actuator fault.…”

Attitude tracking backstepping control for small unmanned helicopters based on adaptive neural network under unknown environment disturbances

“…Helicopters will likely play a significant role in the lives of people in the future. Attitude tracking control is the core technical issue of helicopters, and it is also a research hotspot (Wang et al, 2021d). Current main control methods of small unmanned helicopters include robust control (Yu et al, 2022), model predictive control (Wang et al, 2021a), neural network control (Sun et al, 2021), and adaptive control (Tran et al, 2020; Wang and Zhao, 2022).…”