Integral Command Filtered Backstepping Control of a Flexible UAV

Abstract

Airships, as the significant UAV, have a need for greater autonomy in their new missions. Therefore, airship flight control systems require precise dynamic modeling, taking into account the effect of flexibility and the interaction with aerodynamic forces. This research effort develops an efficient modeling of the autonomous flexible airship. The formalisation used is based on the Lagrange method. The resulting model includes the rigid body motion, the elastic deformation, and the coupling between them. Based on the precise flexible dynamic model, a novel backstepping nonlinear controller with integral action is proposed for motion control systems. The resulting feedback controller is able to adapt to actuator performance limitations, such as limitations in magnitude and rate of change of rudder, than conventional backstepping controller without integral action. With the deformation considered, the presented controller could resist the flexible uncertainty effect, and the system’s trajectory tracking ability is significantly improved. The approach guarantees exponential stability of a compensated tracking error in the sense of Lyapunov.