Tracking Control of the Six-rotor UAV with Input Dead-zone and Saturation

A trajectory tracking controller is designed for a six-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) with input dead-zone and saturation. The six-rotor UAV system is divided into two subsystems by using the double closed-loop control strategy. The outer loop control is used to control the position subsystem, and the inner loop control is used to control the attitude subsystem. The dead-zone and saturation are non-smooth. This nonlinear property is approximated by a non-affine smooth function and transformed from non-affine to affine by using the mean-value theorem. Applied with backstepping method and the Nussbaum gain method, the tracking controller of the six-rotor UAV system is designed, which effectively solves the influence of input dead-zone and saturation on system instability, realizes tracking control, and ensures the stability of the system. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the MATLAB simulation example. © 2022, IAENG International Journal of Applied Mathematics. All Rights Reserved.