State Prediction and Anti-Interference-Based Flight Path-Following for UAVs

To eliminate the influence of nonlinear state terms in the highly-coupled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) model and improve the aircraft’s ability to suppress wind field interferences, this work presents a path-following scheme for UAVs. This method uses the radial basis neural network (RBNN) to develop an adaptive approximation law for the gyroscopic effect function to balance for the influence of system uncertainty and nonlinear state terms on UAV modeling and reduce the dependence of the UAV’s roll and pitch control orders on attitude velocity information. In addition, the adaptive update laws of the disturbance predictions are designed to compensate for the control input and repress the chattering and deviation of the drone. The stability of the proposed controller was proven by using the Lyapunov theorem. Simulations and experiments have shown that the controller can perform faster convergence speed and higher following accuracy of the flight position and attitude errors.