Nonlinear tracking control of the VTOL aircraft

Abstract

In this paper, we present a nonlinear tracking controller for the nonminimum-phase, underactuated model of a vertical take off and landing (VTOL) aircraft. Specifically, the controller is designed to ensure that the VTOL aircraft position/orientation tracks a reference signal generator. The controller ensures that the position/orientation tracking error can be exponentially forced into an arbitrarily small neighborhood around zero (i.e., globally uniformly ultimately bounded (GUUB) tracking).