Path following for the uncoupled pvtol aircraft based on the backstepping technique

This paper proposes a path following controller for the uncoupled planar vertical take off and landing (PVTOL) aircraft via the backstepping procedure. The idea of the path following controller design is finding a virtual target point to be tracked on the desired path and designing control inputs to guarantee the errors between the actual aircraft and virtual point converge to zero. The proposed path following controller enjoys the crucial properties of the path attractiveness and the path invariance (i.e. if the mass center of the PVTOL is initialized on the path and its initial velocity is tangent to the path, then the PVTOL aircraft remains on the path at all future time). In the end of this article, several numerical simulations are shown to verify the effectiveness of the proposed nonlinear state feedback controller.