Some Tracking Problems for Aerospace Models with Input Constraints

We study tracking controller design problems for key models of planar vertical takeoff and landing (PVTOL) aircraft and unmanned air vehicles (UAVs). The novelty of our PVTOL work is the global boundedness of our controllers in the decoupled coordinates, the positive uniform lower bound on the thrust controller, the applicability of our work to cases where the velocity measurements may not be available, the uniform global asymptotic stability and uniform local exponential stability of our closed loop tracking dynamics, the generality of our class of trackable reference trajectories, and the input-to-state stability of the controller performance under actuator errors of arbitrarily large amplitude. The significance of our UAV results is the generality of the trackable trajectories, the input-to-state stability properties of the tracking dynamics with respect to additive uncertainty on the controllers, and our ability to satisfy command amplitude and command rate constraints as well as state dependent command constraints and a state constraint on the velocity. Our work is based on a Matrosov approach for converting a nonstrict Lyapunov function for the UAV tracking dynamics into a strict one, in conjunction with asymptotic strict Lyapunov function methods and bounded backstepping.