Adaptive backstepping trajectory tracking controller for a miniature helicopter

摘要

An adaptive backstepping controller is proposed to achieve the asymptotically stable trajectory tracking for a miniature helicopter. The helicopter model is firstly decomposed into a cascaded structure between the position and attitude loops with unmodeled dynamics. The backstepping technique is applied to exploit this cascaded structure and to streamline the controller design procedure. Hyperbolic tangent functions, instead of traditional sign functions, are adopted to complete adaptive algorithms for adjusting the upper bounds of the unmodeled dynamics. Further, the controller introduces an auxiliary dynamic system to ensure the thrust constraint and to obviate singularity during the command attitude extraction. The stability analysis demonstrates that, the asymptotical stability of the auxiliary dynamic system warrants the asymptotically stable tracking of the miniature helicopter system. Simulations verify the theoretical results and analyze the tracking performance. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.