Abstract:

A position feedback dynamic surface control method for non-minimum phase underactuated vertical takingoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft is proposed. Firstly, a high gain observer is designed to estimate unknown system states. Then, the dynamic surface control method is applied to conquer the problem of “explosion of complexity” existing in the Backstepping approach and the controller design procedure is simplified at the same time. Finally, Lyapunov stability analysis indicates that the dynamic surface controller can guarantee stability of the closedloop system and arbitrarily small tracking errors through adjusting the controller parameters. Both theoretic analysis and simulation show that the proposed controller can lighten the computational burden,reduce the requirement of state measurement and achieve accurate tracking control for the underactuated VTOL aircraft. Furthermore, the control system shows robustness to parameter uncertainty.