Output tracking control for a velocity-sensorless VTOL aircraft with measurement delays

In this paper, we develop a non-linear controller to achieve output tracking for a velocity-sensorless vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft in the presence of measurement delays. By applying the Pade approximation technique, the original controlled system is transformed into an augmented dimension system without any time delay. After constructing full-order observers, error coordinate transformation, and system decomposition, the tracking problem of the newly transformed system is changed into the stabilisation problem of two non-minimum phase subsystems and one minimum phase subsystem. The resulting controller not only forces the VTOL aircraft to asymptotically track the desired trajectories, but also drives the unstable internal dynamics, which stands for the non-minimum property of VTOL aircraft, to follow the causal ideal internal dynamics (IID) solved via the stable system centre (SSC) method. Numerical simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.