Prescribed performance tracking control for an unmanned aerial vehicle under desired trajectory attacks

This paper proposes a prescribed performance tracking control method for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to counteract both desired trajectory attacks and time-varying disturbances. First, an extended state observer is designed to filter position and velocity measurements and to estimate and compensate for security threats such as desired trajectory attacks and external disturbances. Then, under the backstepping framework, the transient and steady-state responses of the position tracking error are constrained using a barrier function. Subsequently, a security controller that incorporates a compensation mechanism -namely, a thrust command law- is derived. The desired attitude angles are then determined. Following this, the attitude tracking controller is designed based on the backstepping method. Finally, simulation results for different scenarios are presented to verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme.