Adaptive Fuzzy Control for Altitude Regulation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper focuses on the longitudinal motion control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with modeling uncertainties to maintain a stationary altitude or track a desired longitudinal trajectory while carrying dynamic loads in the air. In pursuit of developing a control methodology with broad applicability, a generic model based approach has been adopted. Some of the dynamic and fluctuating uncertainties in both the model and the carried load are compensated by estimating them through an adaptive fuzzy network, and canceling these estimates within a recently developed high-gain control design that involves tanh(·) function-based proportional integrator derivative compensation of tracking errors. The closed-loop stability and tracking error convergence properties for the proposed control scheme are established through a Lyapunov analysis procedure. Numerical simulations have been conducted to validate the theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.