Adaptive tracking control for a model helicopter with disturbances

A nonlinear adaptive control algorithm is presented for a model helicopter to achieve the trajectory tracking in the presence of external disturbances. The design process is based on the backstepping technology with the simplified helicopter model. A command filter is utilized to avoid the complicated derivative computation of the virtual control. With the property of the hyperbolic tangent function, upper bounds of the disturbing terms composed by unmodeled dynamics, command filter errors and other external disturbances are estimated by adaptive algorithms and compensated for in control laws. It is proved that the proposed control algorithm guarantees uniform boundedness of the tracking error of the complete closed-loop system. Simulations verify the significant tracking performance of the proposed controller.