Nonlinear flight control in the presence of structural changes and external disturbances

This paper presents a flight control design methodology for the full nonlinear model of unmanned aerial vehicles in the presence of parametric and nonparametric modeling uncertainties and unknown external disturbances. The proposed controller is based on function approximations, adaptive block backstepping and continuous adaptive bounding techniques. It guarantees asymptotic tracking of a given smooth reference command and stability of the closed-loop system, assuming no knowledge on the bounds of uncertainties. The performance of the control algorithm is demonstrated on a simulation example.