Global stabilizing control design for the PVTOL aircraft using saturation functions on the inputs

We present a global stabilization algorithm for the Planar Vertical Takeoff and Landing (PVTOL) aircraft, with bounded inputs. We first stabilize the altitude of the aircraft and then take care of the horizontal position and the roll angle. The control strategy is based on the use of nonlinear combinations of linear saturation functions bounding the thrust input and the rolling moment to arbitrary saturation limits. We provide global convergence of the state to the origin. Note that the methodology that we present here, is similar to previous works that we already proposed for such a system. The interest of this alternative control strategy relies on the fact that the altitude of the aircraft is first stabilized, which is more reliable for implementations on real experiments.