Improved Back-stepping Control for Nonlinear Small UAV Systems with Transient Prescribed Performance Design

This paper proposes an improved back-stepping control approach and its application to small nonlinear UAV systems with uncertainties such as external disturbance. Unlike traditional methods, the idea of prescribed performance function (PPF) is incorporated into design, that both transient steady-state can be strictly guaranteed. Moreover, we design a novel tracking differentiator avoid “differential expansion” problem well caused by calculation derivative. Significantly, approximators (e.g. neural networks) are widely used address unknown nonlinearities in designs not needed. Finally, numerical simulation verifies convergence robustness system, results show strategy obtain better performance.