Path Following for the Uncoupled PVTOL Aircraft Based on the Backstepping Technique

This paper proposes a path following controller for the uncoupled planar vertical take off and landing (PVTOL) aircraft via the backstepping procedure. The idea of the path following controller design is finding a virtual target point to be tracked on the desired path and designing control inputs to guarantee the errors between the actual aircraft and virtual point converge to zero. The proposed path following controller enjoys the crucial properties of the path attractiveness and the path invariance (i.e. if the mass center of the PVTOL is initialized on the path and its initial velocity is tangent to the path, then the PVTOL aircraft remains on the path at all future time). In the end of this article, several numerical simulations are shown to verify the effectiveness of the proposed nonlinear state feedback controller.

[1]  Luca Consolini,et al.  Path following for the PVTOL: A set stabilization approach , 2008, 2008 47th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[2]  Galip Cansever,et al.  Stabilization of uncoupled PVTOL aircraft based on a Lyapunov function , 2012 .

[3]  Steven Lake Waslander,et al.  Path following for a quadrotor using dynamic extension and transverse feedback linearization , 2012, 2012 IEEE 51st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).

[4]  John R. Hauser,et al.  Trajectory Manifold Exploration for the PVTOL aircraft , 2005, Proceedings of the 44th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[5]  J. H. Sossa-Azuela,et al.  A backstepping-based procedure with saturation functions to control the PVTOL system , 2016 .

[6]  R. Olfati-Saber,et al.  Global configuration stabilization for the VTOL aircraft with strong input coupling , 2000, Proceedings of the 39th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (Cat. No.00CH37187).

[7]  Manfredi Maggiore,et al.  Path following controller for a quadrotor helicopter , 2012, 2012 American Control Conference (ACC).

[8]  S. Shankar Sastry,et al.  Nonlinear control design for slightly non-minimum phase systems: Application to V/STOL aircraft , 1992, Autom..

[9]  Sant Kumar,et al.  Path following for quadrotors , 2017, 2017 IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA).

[10]  Michael Malisoff,et al.  On tracking for the PVTOL model with bounded feedbacks , 2011, Proceedings of the 2011 American Control Conference.

[11]  Hassan K. Khalil,et al.  Nonlinear Systems Third Edition , 2008 .

[12]  Luca Consolini,et al.  Path following for the PVTOL aircraft , 2010, Autom..

[13]  B. Paden,et al.  A different look at output tracking: control of a VTOL aircraft , 1994, Proceedings of 1994 33rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[14]  N. Harris McClamroch,et al.  Tracking and maneuver regulation control for nonlinear nonminimum phase systems: application to flight control , 2002, IEEE Trans. Control. Syst. Technol..