Rapid turning maneuver flight control for a high agility UAV using robust adaptive augmented backstepping

The paper presents a new robust adaptive augmented backstepping control scheme for rapid turning maneuver of a high agility unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The proposed control scheme consists of a baseline backstepping controller which can deal with the couplings of kinematic and inertial during fast rolling and generates commands tracking control inputs, and a robust adaptive compensator which can ensure bounded output tracking error in the presence of unmodeled dynamics. Effectiveness and robustness of the designed scheme has been verified through detailed stability analysis and a number of simulations on a nonlinear 6DOF UAV model which show that the proposed robust adaptive augmented controller is competent to perform rapid turning maneuver in full flight envelop and improve the robustness of flight control system substantially.