Prescribed Performance Disturbance Rejection Tracking Control of UAVs via High-Order Fully Actuated System Approach

This paper investigates the prescribed performance disturbance rejection tracking control problem for the high-order fully actuated (HOFA) model of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). First, the position and attitude of the UAV are transformed into the discrete HOFA model with arbitrarily configurable poles and disturbances, and an enhanced intermediate estimator (IE) is designed based on the HOFA model to simultaneously estimate the disturbances and their higher-order increments. Then, an integrated model predictive control (MPC) with prescribed performance is designed. All disturbance prior information is merged into the prediction equation to improve the system performance, and the feedback or nominal MPC based disturbance rejection controller is demonstrated to be a special case of the method. Meanwhile, the terminal constraint set is separated from the terminal penalty to ensure that the tracking error converges quickly and remains within the performance envelope. Finally, the effectiveness and superiority of the method is verified by simulation and Pixhawk/Simulink hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experiment.