Predictor-based controllers for UAVs with input delay

This paper proposes predictor-based controllers for a class of systems with input delay and which relate to the control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The first control problem considered is motion control where position of the vehicle is regulated to a constant. The second problem arises from visual servoing where camera measurements are used to control the vehicle's relative pose to a visual target. The UAV control is assumed to have an inner-outer loop structure with the delay appearing only in the outer loop variables. In the visual servoing case, a projection-based adaptive law is developed since depth information cannot be determined from the image of a single camera. Sufficient conditions in form of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) are given for global asymptotic stability of the outer-loop.