Approximate trajectory tracking of input‐disturbed PVTOL aircraft with delayed attitude measurements

In this paper, we address the flight‐trajectory tracking problem of an input‐disturbed planar vertical take‐off and landing (PVTOL) aircraft with delayed attitude measurements. By applying the first‐order Padé approximation to deal with the time delay functions, the problem is reduced to the output tracking of a new non‐minimum‐phase system without delay. A tracking controller, consisting of a linear static‐state feedback term, a switching control term and a nonlinear auxiliary input term, is proposed for robust stabilization of the output‐tracking errors together with the internal dynamics. Numerical simulations are performed to show the main results.