Adaptive Neural Network Control for Fixed-Wing UAV With Disturbance Observer Under Switching Disturbance

The adaptive neural network (NN) control for the fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (FUAV) under the unmodeled dynamics and the time-varying switching disturbance (TVSD) is investigated in this article. To better describe the TVSD induced by the change in the flight area of the FUAV, a switching augmented model (SAM) based on the known information about the TVSD is proposed first. The parameter adaptation technique is used to estimate the related TVSD. Thereafter, the time-varying disturbance that cannot be described by the SAM is estimated by the disturbance observer (DO). The radial basis function NN (RBFNN) is adopted to approximate the unknown unmodeled dynamics. The coupling terms derived from the co-design of DO and the parameter adaptation (PA) are separated by some inequality techniques. Then, the separated unknown terms are eliminated by designing the parameters of the controller and that of the adaptive law. The separated known terms are tackled by adding robust control terms to the controller. In addition, to improve the estimation performance for the TVSD and RBFNN, the auxiliary system in the DO form is designed. Sufficient stable conditions about the closed-loop switched system (CLSS) are obtained with and without the inequality about the switching times. Finally, an illustrative example is given to show the feasibility and advantage of the proposed control strategy by the attitude model of the FUAV.