An Alternative Nonlinear Control Law for the Global Stabilization of the PVTOL Vehicle

A popular method for the control of the planar vertical takeoff and landing vehicle (PVTOL) is to cast the system into the form of a cascade nonlinear system with an exponentially stable linear subsystem, as suggested by Olfati-Saber in 2002. This idea has since been incorporated into many other published works. The contribution of this note is to demonstrate an alternative cascade structure, achieved by minimizing the interconnection term between closed-loop subsystems. Global stability of the proposed controller is proven, and simulation results suggest improved performance of this new approach as compared to that previously published.