Active Disturbance Rejection Control Design for Trajectory Tracking of Parafoil and Payload System

This paper presents the design and implementation of the trajectory tracking controller for the parafoil and payload system. The controller is developed based on the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) algorithm and is adequate to cope with the nonlinear dynamics of the parafoil and payload system and the disturbances. Horizontal and vertical control channels are design for the parafoil and payload system to track the desired trajectory. Simulations and comparisons are utilized to illustrate the effectiveness and advantage of ADRC. Wind disturbances of both stable and NASA wind gust model are added to the simulations as external disturbances. A tuning method for discrete ADRC controller to adapt different sampling rate is proposed, which simplifies the tuning procedure of the control system with adjustable sampling rate.