Approximate trajectory tracking of input-disturbed PVTOL aircraft with delayed attitude measurements

In this paper, we address the flight-trajectory tracking problem of an input-disturbed planar vertical take-off and landing (PVTOL) aircraft with delayed attitude measurements. By applying the first-order Padé approximation to deal with the time delay functions, the problem is reduced to the output tracking of a new non-minimum-phase system without delay. A tracking controller, consisting of a linear static-state feedback term, a switching control term and a nonlinear auxiliary input term, is proposed for robust stabilization of the output-tracking errors together with the internal dynamics. Numerical simulations are performed to show the main results.