Design of active disturbance rejection backstepping attitude controller for maneuvering glide vehicles

This paper presents a nonlinear flight attitude control law for a novel near space maneuvering glide vehicle. An active disturbance rejection back-stepping controller integrating back-stepping method and extended state observer is developed. The loop separation and matched uncertainties assumptions are removed when using back-stepping control upon a nominal nonlinear system. By introducing a command filter to modify back-stepping control, the derivatives of virtual control are easy to obtain that greatly facilitates control design. In addition, the nonlinear extended state observer is applied to estimate and compensate uncertainties in real time, thus improving both robustness and performance. To evaluate the proposed control method, numerical simulations and comparisons are performed using six-degree of freedom nonlinear dynamics.