A Generic Self-Evolving Neuro-Fuzzy Controller Based High-Performance Hexacopter Altitude Control System

Nowadays, the application of fully autonomous system like rotary wing unamnned air vehicles (UAVs) are increasing sharply. Due to the complex nonlinear dynamics a huge research interest is witnessed in developing learning machine based intelligent, self-organizing evolving controller for these vehicles notably to address the system's dynamic characteristics. In this work, such an evolving controller namely Generic-controller (Gcontroller) is proposed to control the altitude of a rotary wing UAV namely hexacopter. This controller can work with very minor expert domain knowledge. The evolving architecture of this controller is based on an advanced incremental learning algorithm namely Generic Evolving Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (GENEFIS). The controller does not require any offline training, since it starts operating from scratch with an empty set of fuzzy rules, and then add or delete rules on demand. The adaptation laws for the consequent paramters are derived from the sliding model control (SMC) theory. The Lyapunov theory is used to guarantee the stability of the proposed controller. In addition, an auxiliary robustifying control term is implemented to obtain an uniform asymptotic convergence of tracking error to zero. Finally, the G-controller's performance evaluation is observed through the altitude tracking of an UAV namely hexacopter for various trajectories.