Asynchronous H_∞ control for unmanned aerial vehicles: Switched polytopic system approach

This study is concerned with the H_∞ control for the full-envelope unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the presence of missing measurements and external disturbances. With the dramatic parameter variations in large flight envelope and the locally overlapped switching laws in flight, the system dynamics is modeled as a locally overlapped switched polytopic system to reduce designing conservatism and solving complexity. Then, considering updating lags of controller's switching signals and the weighted coefficients of the polytopic subsystems induced by missing measurements, an asynchronous H_∞ control method is proposed such that the system is stable and a desired disturbance attenuation level is satisfied. Furthermore, the sufficient existing conditions of the desired switched parameter-dependent H_∞ controller are derived in the form of linear matrix inequality (LMIs) by combining the switched parameter-dependent Lyapunov function method and average dwell time method. Finally, a numerical example based on a highly maneuverable technology (HiMAT) vehicle is given to verify the validity of the proposed method.