Event-Triggered Fuzzy Flight Control of a Two-Degree-of-Freedom Helicopter System

In this article, the problem of flight control for a two-degree-of-freedom helicopter system is studied. Since the helicopter is a multiinput, multioutput nonlinear control system, a Takagi–Sugeno (T–S) fuzzy model is applied to approximate the system. All submodels of the new T–S fuzzy model contain constant terms due to the nonlinear characteristics of the helicopter system. In this article, sampled-data control is considered and the sampled data are transmitted to the system over a communication network. A large amount of sampled data transmitted over the network can significantly increase the computational and communication burdens for the network with a limited bandwidth. To overcome this difficulty, an event-triggered mechanism is introduced. In order to validly control the T–S fuzzy system, a fuzzy proportional integral-derivative (PID) controller is designed based on the Lyapunov method and practical stability criteria, which are obtained by using improved integral inequalities and the linear matrix inequality technique. Finally, a numerical example is given to show the effectiveness of the obtained results.