Propeller Thrust-Saving Adaptive Control for Rotor-Assisted Vehicle via the Triggering Guidance

This article proposes a propeller thrust-saving adaptive path following control algorithm for the rotor-assisted vehicle (RAV) by using the triggering guidance principle. The latter is on basis of the finite boundary triggering (FBT) rule. Owning to this, the frequent changing of the reference signal is reduced obviously. Matching with the developed guidance principle, two control techniques are studied, namely: 1) a thrust-saving mechanism is provided via the rotor-sail compensation under the uncertain wind field and 2) an output-based variable parameter rule is presented to dynamically adjust the triggering threshold, leading to a lower transmission of the commands. The proposed control algorithm can release the constraint of the fixed threshold parameter and save fuel consumption of the main engine. According to the Lyapunov theorem, it is proved that all errors in the network system are guaranteed to be semi-global uniform ultimate bounded (SGUUB) stable. Finally, the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed algorithm are verified by numerical simulations and the semi-physical experiment. Quantitative analysis demonstrates that the proposed algorithm can achieve a 10% reduction in thrust-saving compared to traditional methods.