Enhancing prescribed-time trajectory tracking control for a stratospheric airship with prescribed performance

• A new prescribed-time stability criterion is proposed to avoid the infinite gain phenomenon. • An enhanced same-side performance function is constructed to minimize overshoot and to quantify performance. • A novel barrier Lyapunov function is integrated into the control algorithm to address the constraint requirement. • Estimates of disturbances are obtained from new prescribed-time disturbance observer. This paper studies the tracking control problem for stratospheric airships with user-specified performance. Dealing with the infinite gain phenomenon in the prescribed-time stability, a new stability criterion with bounded gain is proposed by using a new time-varying scaling function. Moreover, a same-side performance function and a novel barrier Lyapunov function are incorporated into the control algorithm, which can compress the feasible domain of tracking error to minimize the overshoot and solve the difficult in tracking error not converging to zero simultaneously. The proposed scheme guarantees the airship capable of operating autonomously with satisfactory transient performance and tracking accuracy, where the performance parameters can be designed artificially and link to the physical process directly. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is verified by theoretical analysis and numerical simulation.