A High‐Order Fully Actuated System Approach for Prescribed Performance Tracking Control of Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle With Time‐Varying Uncertain Aerodynamic Parameters and Disturbances

ABSTRACT In this paper, a high‐order, fully actuated (HOFA) system approach‐based adaptive control design, with guaranteed transient and steady‐state tracking performances, is proposed for trajectory tracking of a lightweight, low‐cost quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (QUAV). Unlike most existing results on adaptive control for QUAVs, we consider the aerodynamic parameters and disturbance terms of the QUAV model as time‐varying uncertainties. These uncertainties are only assumed to be bounded, with no additional restrictions imposed on their bounds and derivatives, making our approach more suitable for QUAVs in dynamic harsh environments. Moreover, in contrast to the existing first‐order state‐space model‐based methods such as typical adaptive backstepping designs, the proposed HOFA system‐based approach does not require multiple design steps and can achieve arbitrarily assignable eigenstructure like a stabilized linear system, which makes the control design very simple and easy to implement for practical applications. In addition, by introducing the prescribed performance control technique and incorporating a novel appointed‐time performance function, it is shown that all tracking errors can be steered into their predesignated precision regions within their respective pre‐appointed settling times. Finally, the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method are validated through simulation.