Comparison of backstepping, sliding mode and PID regulators for a voltage inverter

<p><span>In the present paper, an efficient and performant nonlinear regulator is designed for the control of the pulse width modulation (PWM) voltage inverter that can be used in a standalone photovoltaic microgrid. The main objective of our control is to produce a sinusoidal voltage output signal with amplitude and frequency that are fixed by the reference signal for different loads including linear or nonlinear types. A comparative performance study of controllers based on linear and non-linear techniques such as backstepping, sliding mode, and proportional integral derivative (PID) is developed to ensure the best choice among these three types of controllers. The performance of the system is investigated and compared under various operating conditions by simulations in the MATLAB/Simulink environment to demonstrate the effectiveness of the control methods. Our investigation shows that the backstepping controller can give better performance than the sliding mode and PID controllers. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed backstepping controller are verified experimentally in terms of tracking objectives.</span></p>

Nonlinear Robust Control on Yaw Motion of a Variable-Speed Unmanned Aerial Helicopter under Multi-Source Disturbances

This paper studies the multi-source disturbances attenuation problem on the yaw motion of unmanned aerial helicopter with a variable-speed rotor. The yaw motion subsystem dominated by an electrically-driven tail rotor is firstly introduced, and its trajectory accuracy requires particularly close attention. To this end, we establish a fourth-order yaw error dynamic equation; subsequently, a nonlinear robust control scheme based on optimal H∞ principle is developed, consisting of laws of virtual functions, parameter estimation and a compensation signal. The novelty of this scheme lies in unifying the techniques to deal with the uncertain parameters, noise perturbations, actuator output fault and external airflow turbulence into a simple framework. Stability analysis guarantees that the yaw closed-loop system has the predefined performance of disturbance suppression in the sense of a finite L2-gain. Comparison results with the extended state observer based backstepping controller verify the effectiveness and superior performance of proposed scheme in an aircraft prototype.

Adaptive Control for Quadrotors with Uncertain and Faulty Actuators

Two adaptive control strategies are presented in this paper for two types of quadrotors to cope with potential uncertainties and faults in the actuator system. The four actuators of the considered quadrotors are distinct and suffered from loss of effectiveness (LOE) as well. To accomandate unknown actuator parameters, a filter-based immersion and invariance (I&I) adaptive controllers are designed for attitude and altitude subsystems, respectively, and an integral backstepping controller is developed for the horizontal subsystem to achieve null steady-state error. Both simulation and experiment results are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of trajectory tracking performance and fault-tolerant accomondation ability of the proposed control schemes.