Robust event-triggered tracking control for an unmanned aerial vehicle with non-vanishing disturbances

Abstract

This paper addresses the trajectory tracking problem of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the presence of unknown external disturbances. It deviates from conventional dynamic surface control (DSC) techniques by introducing a new auxiliary variable for compensating filtering errors and using backstepping, and the desired thrust is then designed. Additionally, it presents a dynamic event-triggered strategy that incorporates error compensation, aiming to lessen communication burdens in developing angular velocity commands. The key feature of the proposed method is two-fold: firstly, two auxiliary variables are designed resorting to a filtering mechanism to compensate for the errors induced by the DSC and the event-triggered mechanism, thereby improving tracking accuracy. Secondly, it proposes a novel disturbance compensation approach to effectively manage non-vanishing, time-varying disturbances without requiring the a prior knowledge of their derivatives. This method efficiently saves communication resources, particularly by avoiding Zeno behavior, while maintaining high-accuracy tracking control of the UAV. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach and validate the theoretical findings.