Adaptive fuzzy-based backstepping control of a 3-DOF helicopter testbed with dead-zone

This paper investigates the attitude tracking problem of a 3-degree-of-freedom helicopter testbed with dead zone. System nonlinearity, model uncertainty and input dead zone are addressed. The adaptive backstepping technique is adopted to construct the controller. Moreover, fuzzy logic is used to estimate the model uncertainty and external disturbance. It's shown by Lyapunov stability analysis that the closed-loop attitude tracking system can be stabilized by the proposed controller with high control-accuracy guaranteed. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is further confirmed by simulation experiments.