Fixed-Time Adaptive Tracking Control for a Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Input Saturation

Considering the problem of tracking control for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (QUAV) with input saturation, parameter uncertainties and external disturbances, a command filtered backstepping-based fixed-time adaptive control scheme was developed. The problem of “explosion of complexity” (EOC) is tackled by utilizing the fixed-time command filter, and the influence of filtered error is removed based on the fractional power-error-compensation mechanism. A fixed-time auxiliary system was designed to compensate for the input saturation of the QUAV. It strictly proves that the closed-loop system signals are fixed-time bounded, and the tracking errors converge to a sufficiently small region near the origin in a fixed time, and the convergence time is independent of the initial states. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed fixed-time adaptive control algorithm is demonstrated via a numerical simulation.