Fully Actuated System Approach to Tracking Control of Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper focuses on the problem of the trajectory tracking control of a type of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by utilizing a fully actuated system (FAS) approach. Firstly, a nonlinear dynamic system model of the fixed-wing UAV is established, of which unmatched external disturbances and nonlinear uncertainties are taken into account. Secondly, the trajectory tracking problem of the UAVs is transformed into a stabilization problem of a fully actuated system. To tackle unmatched lumped disturbances, a new robust tracking control law is developed by drawing inspiration from the control design of the FAS approach. Then, a candidate Lyapunov function is applied to derive the convergence conditions of the resulting tracking error system, according to which the proposed control law guarantees that the tracking errors asymptotically converge to a bounded ellipsoid that is tunable by controller parameters. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed trajectory tracking control law is verified by simulation results.