Trajectory Tracking Control for a Hexacopter UAV: A Constraint-Following Approach Guaranteeing Prescribed Performance

The development of low-altitude economy driven by aircraft has garnered significant attention from both academia and industry. The hexacopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an important component of low-altitude aircraft. Although it has not been as widely used as the quadcopter UAV, the greater delivery capacity and enhanced fault tolerance sustain its promising development prospects. However, the trajectory tracking control, a fundamental task of hexacopter UAV, remains challenging if the control algorithm is required to work on the dynamics level with theoretical performance guarantees, since its position control has to be realized by its attitude control. This study proposes a novel trajectory tracking control with prescribed performance for the hexacopter UAV that works on the dynamic model. The proposed approach is established by a dual-loop constraint-following control with the state-transformation technique, where equality and inequality constraints are used to describe the tracking task and the prescribed performance, respectively. The effectiveness of the proposed control is endorsed by rigorous theoretical analysis and simulations.