Fuzzy adaptive tracking control within the full envelope for an unmanned aerial vehicle

Motivated by the autopilot of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a wide flight envelope span experiencing large parametric variations in the presence of uncertainties, a fuzzy adaptive tracking controller (FATC) is proposed. The controller consists of a fuzzy baseline controller and an adaptive increment, and the main highlight is that the fuzzy baseline controller and adaptation laws are both based on the fuzzy multiple Lyapunov function approach, which helps to reduce the conservatism for the large envelope and guarantees satisfactory tracking performances with strong robustness simultaneously within the whole envelope. The constraint condition of the fuzzy baseline controller is provided in the form of linear matrix inequality (LMI), and it specifies the satisfactory tracking performances in the absence of uncertainties. The adaptive increment ensures the uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB) predication errors to recover satisfactory responses in the presence of uncertainties. Simulation results show that the proposed controller helps to achieve high-accuracy tracking of airspeed and altitude desirable commands with strong robustness to uncertainties throughout the entire flight envelope.