Improvement in Trajectory Tracking Control of a Small Scale Helicopter via Backstepping

This paper presents a Lyapunov-based controller with integral action which improves the trajectory tracking capability of a small-scale helicopter. An approximate helicopter model with decoupled dynamics is adopted for the controller design. The controller is completely derived based on the backstepping technique. Three numerical simulations are conducted to illustrate the tracking performance of the proposed control method. The simulation results using the full helicopter model with coupled dynamics show that the proposed controller is capable of giving better tracking performance while comparing with the robust control method in [R. Mahony & T. Hamel, International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control, vol. 14, no. 12, pp.1035-1059 (2004)].