In this paper, the problem of model reference resilient control is investigated for the helicopter system with the time-varying disturbance and unmeasurable states. Firstly, a disturbance observer and a state observer are built to estimate the time-varying disturbance and unmeasurable states. Then, combining the methods of model reference control and disturbance observer-based control, the state feedback robust resilient control scheme and the dynamic output feedback robust resilient control method are proposed, respectively. Under the two developed robust resilient control schemes, sufficient conditions are obtained to guarantee that the helicopter system asymptotically tracks the reference model with H ∞ performance. Finally, simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the model reference resilient control method.
KEYWORDSdisturbance observer, dynamic output feedback control, helicopter, model reference control, resilient control, state observer
INTRODUCTIONAs a very common aircraft, the helicopter has been used in many fields, such as transportation industry, communication, and local war. Different with other aircrafts, helicopters could be used in many special occasions for their unique capability, for example, first aid at sea, forest fire rescue, and commercial transportation in badly traffic place, because they can land or take off in a small limited space for example, in the work of Johnson. 1 Hence, the study of the helicopter control systems is very meaningful. Many books about helicopter control systems have been published, such as the works of Yang 2 and Mettler. 3 With the development of the helicopter, more and more results focus on the helicopter control system technique, and many excellent control methods have been used in helicopter control systems design in the works of Gadewadikar et al 4 and Mahony and Hamel. 5 Using the disturbance observer-based backstepping method, in the work of Lu et al, 6 a flight controller was designed for the small-scale helicopter. In the work of He and Han, 7 the method of feedback linearization was investigated for an unmanned helicopter model. So far, a number of results for the advanced control theory have been applied in many fields of helicopters. Meanwhile, the robustness and antidisturbance ability of the control system attract more and more attention from specialist of cybernetics.In many practical engineering applications, the systems often suffer from various disturbances and perturbations, for example, the system parameter uncertainty and the variation of external environment. Due to these disturbances, many excellent performances of control systems are always damaged, or even appear to instability. Hence, enhancing the antidisturbance ability of the closed-loop system is critical for designed controller. Many efficacious antidisturbance methods have been used to deal with the disturbances appearing in practical systems, such as the adaptive control, 8,9 the robust control, 10 the neural network control, 11,12 and the disturbance observ...