An MRP-based prescribed performance sliding mode control of UAV under wind disturbance for aircraft inspection

Abstract

This article studies an anti-collision control method for the trajectory tracking problem of an unmanned aerial vehicle for aircraft skin inspection under complex wind disturbance. To guarantee the safety of the aircraft during the inspection, the anti-collision control under wind disturbance is described by the maximum position offset constraint of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Then, an exponential nonlinear integral super-twisting sliding mode (ENISTSM) position controller is designed, and incorporated with the prescribed performance control(PPC) to ensure that the position error is consistently constrained within specified bounds. Subsequently, the attitude and angular velocity cascaded control law is investigated based on the modified Rodrigues parameters (MRPs) attitude representation using the exponential super-twisting sliding mode (ESTSM) method. The proposed method achieves fast tracking of relatively large variable angles and is robust to wind disturbance. In addition, the stability of the controllers is proven via Lyapunov analysis. Finally, the simulation results are included by considering the turbulent wind field to demonstrate the effectiveness and the advantages.