Designated-Time Tracking Strategy for Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Subject to Disturbances

This article focuses on tackling tracking control for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs): ensuring the expected tracking precision within a designated time framework between the quadrotor's attitude/position and the reference signal. The challenge in developing control strategies for the quadrotor UAVs is to compensate multiple unknown external disturbances effectively during the whole-time operation. Based on a series of new time-dependent constraint functions defined by tracking precision and stopping time, we design a bounded continuous control scheme by integrating several compound functions associated with the constraint boundaries. In contrast to current tracking methods for quadrotor UAVs, the proposed technique drives the tracking error to a prespecified compact set within a predesignated time instant, while maintaining closed-loop signals' global boundedness. Three sets of comparative simulations for quadrotor UAVs are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness/superiority of our scheme.