Attitude-guided robust adaptive path following control for ducted fan UAV

This article presents an approach and a systematic design methodology to path following control based on motion decoupling for high-performance ducted fan unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The decoupling is performed according to the principle of regarding the attitude motion as a virtual input of the lateral longitudinal flight dynamics. This allows the attitude and flight controllers to be designed individually without mutual interference. Considering that dynamics of the ducted fan UAV is uncertain, an estimation method of system function based on the smooth saturation function and the state variable integral is proposed. This method has the advantage of less computation while keeping the high estimation performance. The stability analysis and the simulation results showing the practical feasibility of the proposed control scheme to ducted fan UAVs are given.