Singularity-free Backstepping-based Adaptive Control of a Bicopter with Unknown Mass and Inertia

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel singularity-free adaptive control method for a bicopter that effectively handles unknown mass and inertia without requiring parameter inversion, ensuring stable trajectory tracking.

Contribution

It proposes a new backstepping-based adaptive control approach that avoids parameter inversion and only needs the sign of unknown parameters, enhancing stability and robustness.

Findings

Controller successfully stabilizes bicopter with unknown parameters.

Simulation results demonstrate effective trajectory tracking.

Method circumvents issues of classical adaptive backstepping.

Abstract

The paper develops a singularity-free backstepping-based adaptive control for stabilizing and tracking the trajectory of a bicopter system. In the bicopter system, the inertial parameters parameterize the input map. Since the classical adaptive backstepping technique requires the inversion of the input map, which contains the estimate of parameter estimates, the stability of the closed-loop system cannot be guaranteed due to the inversion of parameter estimates. This paper proposes a novel technique to circumvent the inversion of parameter estimates in the control law. The resulting controller requires only the sign of the unknown parameters. The proposed controller is validated in simulation for a smooth and nonsmooth trajectory-tracking problem.