Attitude tracking control design of fixed-wing UAVs having uncertain dynamics and corrupted gyro sensor outputs

Flight performance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) strongly depends on implemented attitude tracking control. For designing better controllers, nonlinear control design techniques are often opted instead of control design based on linearized models. Uncertainty in nonlinear dynamics estimation may arise due to inaccuracies in aerodynamic derivatives and simplifications/assumptions made during the derivation of nonlinear models. This paper considers attitude tracking control of fixed-wing UAVs having uncertain dynamics and corrupted gyro sensor outputs. An integral chain differentiator (ICD) is used to provide the analytical redundancy to the gyros used to measure the angular rates. Two control design schemes are proposed, a neuro-fuzzy adaptive sliding mode control (NFASMC) and an ICD approximation-based fuzzy adaptive sliding mode control (ICD-FASMC). In NFASMC, the uncertain part of the dynamics is estimated using an adaptive radial basis function neural network. Gyro sensor output errors are estimated in real-time, using ICD based error estimation scheme and used in the control law along with the sensor's corrupted outputs. In ICD-FASMC, the uncertain dynamics and angular rates of UAV are estimated using the ICD such that the requirement of the gyro sensor outputs for control design is bypassed. The switching gain of the designed controllers is made adaptive using fuzzy logic to mitigate the chattering effect. The stability of the proposed controllers is proved using the Lyapunov approach. The proposed schemes are implemented using a nonlinear simulation of a fixed-wing UAV. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.