Design of nonlinear state feedback control law for underactuated TORA system: A block backstepping approach

This paper presents the formulation of a novel block-backstepping based control algorithm to address the stabilization problem for the well-known nonlinear benchmark TORA system. The ideas behind the method are as follows. At first, state model of the TORA system has been converted into block-strict feedback form. Then the control Lyapunov function has been designed for each cascaded dynamic block to derive the expression of the control input for the overall nonlinear system. The overall asymptotic stability of the TORA system has been analyzed using Lyapunov Stability Criteria. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm has been verified in the simulation environment.