Deadzone compensation based boundary control of a flexible aerial refueling hose with output constraint

In this paper, boundary control schemes are designed for a flexible aerial refueling hose subject to input deadzone, output constraint and external disturbances, based on partial differential equations (PDEs). Firstly, a basic boundary control scheme, based on the backstepping method, is proposed to regulate the hose's vibration. A radial basis function (RBF) neural network is used to handle the effect of the input deadzone. Then we propose a new controller based on a barrier Lyapunov function to prevent constraint violation. It is shown that the states of the system are proven to converge to a small neighborhood of zero, and the output constraint is not violated in the presence of the input deadzone and external distrubances. Finally, simulation results are demonstrated for control performance verification.