Robust Guaranteed Cost Control for Yaw Control of Helicopter

A new design method of robust guaranteed cost controller with adaptation mechanism was proposed. A linear time-invariant system with time-varying ellipsoidal uncertainty was considered. First, an adaptation mechanism was introduced to establish a target model with adjustable parameters. The adjustable parameters were determined according to the designed adaptive laws to ensure the quadratic stability of the error system between the state trajectory of the plant and that of the target model. Consequently, a robust guaranteed cost tracking controller was proposed, whose gains affinely depended on the designed adjustable parameters, to guarantee the stability of the closed-loop systems. The application of this approach to the yaw control of a small-scale helicopter mounted on an experiment platform shows the effectiveness.