Singularity-free Backstepping-based Adaptive Control of a Bicopter with Unknown Mass and Inertia

The paper develops a singularity-free backstepping-based adaptive control for stabilizing and tracking the trajectory of a bicopter system. In the bicopter system, the inertial parameters parameterize the input map. Since the classical adaptive backstepping technique requires the inversion of the input map, which contains the estimate of parameter estimates, the stability of the closed-loop system cannot be guaranteed due to the inversion of parameter estimates. This paper proposes a novel technique to circumvent the inversion of parameter estimates in the control law. The resulting controller requires only the sign of the unknown parameters. The proposed controller is validated in simulation for a smooth and nonsmooth trajectory-tracking problem.