Saturated Adaptive-Law-Based Backstepping and Its Applications to a Quadrotor Hover

This article presents a saturated adaptive-law-based backstepping control method for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with external dynamic disturbances. In this approach, a novel adaptive backstepping control method with a new command filter is primarily proposed to design the feedback controllers. In order to address the system unknown nonlinearities caused by external dynamic disturbances, a method named “saturated adaptive law approach” is used to estimate the system unknown nonlinearities online. Meanwhile, a filter called “dual command filter” is applied to estimate the derivative of certain signal such that the saturated adaptive law approach can be well implemented. With the help of Lyapunov stability criteria, it is proved that the target signal can be tracked by the output of the system with small error. Finally, our control method is applied to a quadrotor hover system, and two sets of comparison experiments are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed control method.