Adaptive Fixed-Time Control of Autonomous Spacecraft Rendezvous and Docking

In this paper, an adaptive neural network (NN) trajectory tracking control scheme is developed for underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) subject to unknown dynamic parameters and unknown disturbances. A novel additional control based on Nussbaum function is proposed to handle the underactuation problem of AUVs. The radial basis function NNs with minimal learning parameter (MLP) are employed to online approximate the compounded uncertain item due to unknown dynamic parameters and unknown disturbances. On the basics of the above, an adaptive NN trajectory tracking control law is proposed using command filtered vector-backstepping design tool. As a result, the computational burden of the developed trajectory tracking control scheme is significantly reduced, Theoretical analysis indicates that the proposed control law can force the AUV track the desired trajectory and guarantee that all signals in the trajectory tracking closed-loop control system are bounded. Simulation results on an AUV verify the effectiveness of our developed control scheme.

In this paper, we investigate the trajectory tracking control problem of surface ships subject to unknown parameters, unknown time-varying disturbances, and input saturation. The input saturation is approximated using a Gaussian error function. The compounded uncertain term caused by the unknown parameters and disturbances is transformed into a linear parametric form with a single parameter called virtual parameter. Then, a novel robust adaptive ship trajectory tracking control law is designed using the adaptive vector-backstepping design method, where the adaptive law online provides the estimation of the virtual parameter. Further, a finite-time control scheme is developed injecting a power function vector of the position and velocity errors into the proposed control scheme such that the control performance is improved. Both our control schemes are simple to compute and easy to implement in engineering applications. Theoretical analysis indicates that the designed control laws can force the surface ship to track the desired trajectory while guaranteeing the global uniform ultimate boundedness of all the signals in the closed-loop trajectory tracking control system of surface ships. Simulation results and comparison verify the effectiveness of our novel robust adaptive trajectory tracking control schemes.

This paper presented a novel adaptive cascade nonlinear trajectory tracking control scheme of over-actuated autonomous electric vehicles involving input saturation. First, a nonlinear vehicle dynamic model with input saturation is established, which can accurately describe the features of uncertainties and coupling of autonomous electric vehicles, and the hyperbolic tangent function is designed to estimate the saturation function for dealing with the input saturation problem. Then, a novel adaptive cascade trajectory tracking control scheme is designed. An adaptive neural network-based terminal sliding control law is proposed for producing the generalized force/moment in real-time, the asymptotic stability of this adaptive control system is proven by Lyapunov theory, and a quasi-newton distribution law is designed to determine the optimum tire forces that guarantee the actual generalized forces/moment are close to the desired values. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

Adaptive neural network-based trajectory tracking outer loop control for a quadrotor

Intelligent vehicle trajectory tracking exhibits problems such as low adaptability, low tracking accuracy, and poor robustness in complex driving environments with uncertain road conditions. Therefore, an improved method of adaptive model predictive control (AMPC) for trajectory tracking was designed in this study to increase the corresponding tracking accuracy and driving stability of intelligent vehicles under uncertain and complex working conditions. First, based on the unscented Kalman filter, longitudinal speed, yaw speed, and lateral acceleration were considered as the observed variables of the measurement equation to estimate the lateral force of the front and rear tires accurately in real time. Subsequently, an adaptive correction estimation strategy for tire cornering stiffness was designed, an AMPC method was established, and a dynamic prediction time-domain adaptive model was constructed for optimization according to vehicle speed and road adhesion conditions. The improved AMPC method for trajectory tracking was then realized. Finally, the control effectiveness and trajectory tracking accuracy of the proposed AMPC technique were verified via co-simulation using CarSim and MATLAB/Simulink. From the results, a low lateral position error and heading angle error in trajectory tracking were obtained under different vehicle driving conditions and road adhesion conditions, producing high trajectory-tracking control accuracy. Thus, this work provides an important reference for improving the adaptability, robustness, and optimization of intelligent vehicle tracking control systems.

In this article, a practical fixed-time adaptive neural network (NN) trajectory tracking control scheme for underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) subject to uncertain dynamics, unknown time-varying disturbances, an unknown dead zone, actuator faults and input quantization is developed for the first time. Here, a hysteresis quantizer is introduced to decrease the oscillation in the signal quantization process. Then, the radial basis function NN is employed to compensate the uncertainty term in the AUVs trajectory tracking control system. By incorporating the bounded estimate, smoothing functions and parameter adaptive technique, the problem of unknown dead zone, actuator fault and input quantization are addressed. The restrictive conditions of boundedness for the disturbance-like item in conventional sector bounded quantizer is resolved. Subsequently, a practical fixed-time adaptive NN trajectory tracking control law is designed does not require any parameter information of the quantizer under the backstepping design framework. The theoretical analysis further confirms that all signals in the AUV trajectory tracking closed-loop control system remain bounded, and the developed control scheme is shown to be effective through simulation results.

To improve the stability and accuracy of quintic polynomial trajectory tracking, an MPC (model predictive control) and fuzzy PID (proportional‐integral‐difference)‐ based control method are proposed. A lateral tracking controller is designed by using MPC with rule‐based horizon parameters. The lateral tracking controller controls the steering angle to reduce the lateral tracking errors. A longitudinal tracking controller is designed by using a fuzzy PID. The longitudinal controller controls the motor torque and brake pressure referring to a throttle/brake calibration table to reduce the longitudinal tracking errors. By combining the two controllers, we achieve satisfactory trajectory tracking control. Relative vehicle trajectory tracking simulation is carried out under common scenarios of quintic polynomial trajectory in the Simulink/Carsim platform. The result shows that the strategy can avoid excessive trajectory tracking errors which ensures a better performance for trajectory tracking with high safety, stability, and adaptability.

In this paper, we investigate an adaptive output feedback trajectory tracking controller for an underactuated unmanned surface vehicle (USV) with position signals. Using Lyapunov stability theorem and backstepping strategy, a Neural Network (NN)-based adaptive trajectory tracking control scheme is proposed without the velocity informations. The NN is employed to approximate the unknown external disturbances and model parametric uncertainties. Also, a high-gain observer is applied to estimate the USV’ unmeasured velocities, and the NN-based output feedback tracking control is designed. Simulation results are carried out to verify the proposed controller.

This paper proposes a fixed-time prescribed performance control technique to address the challenge of precise trajectory tracking control for unmanned surface vessels (USVs) in the presence of external time-varying disturbances and input saturation. To begin with, a fixed-time disturbance observer is created to handle the time-varying external interference. The observer can accurately estimate and compensate for the disturbance in a fixed time, which effectively improves the robustness of the system. Furthermore, to guarantee both the transient and steady-state response of the system, we employed a specific control technology that ensures the trajectory tracking error remains within a preset bounded range. Then, combined with the fixed-time disturbance observer, the command filter, the prescribed performance control technology, and the fixed-time stability theory, a fixed-time trajectory tracking control law is designed to make the trajectory tracking error of the system converge in a fixed time. Finally, an experiment was designed to validate the suggested control scheme. The results show that under the same conditions, compared with the nonlinear controller and the finite-time controller, the absolute error tracking index of this paper is the lowest, which means that the presented control scheme has higher accuracy.

This work proposes a non-singular fast terminal sliding mode control (NFTSMC) strategy based on the Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) algorithm and a nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO) to address the issues of modeling errors, motion disturbances, and transmission friction in robotic manipulators. Firstly, a novel modular serial 5-DOF robotic manipulator configuration is designed, and its kinematic and dynamic models are established. Secondly, a nonlinear disturbance observer is employed to estimate the total disturbance of the system and apply feedforward compensation. Based on boundary layer technology, an improved NFTSMC method is proposed to accelerate the convergence of tracking errors, reduce chattering, and avoid singularity issues inherent in traditional terminal sliding mode control. The stability of the designed control system is proved using Lyapunov stability theory. Subsequently, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agent based on the TD3 algorithm is trained to adaptively adjust the control gains of the non-singular fast terminal sliding mode controller. The dynamic information of the robotic manipulator is used as the input to the TD3 agent, which searches for optimal controller parameters within a continuous action space. A composite reward function is designed to ensure the stable and efficient learning of the TD3 agent. Finally, the motion characteristics of three joints for the designed 5-DOF robotic manipulator are analyzed. The results show that compared to the non-singular fast terminal sliding mode control algorithm based on a nonlinear disturbance observer (NDONFT), the non-singular fast terminal sliding mode control algorithm integrating a nonlinear disturbance observer and the Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm (TD3NDONFT) reduces the mean absolute error of position tracking for the three joints by 7.14%, 19.94%, and 6.14%, respectively, and reduces the mean absolute error of velocity tracking by 1.78%, 9.10%, and 2.11%, respectively. These results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in enhancing the trajectory tracking accuracy of the robotic manipulator under unknown time-varying disturbances and demonstrate its strong robustness against sudden disturbances.

Robots and automated systems are increasingly being introduced to unknown and dynamic environments where they are required to handle disturbances, unmodeled dynamics, and parametric uncertainties. Robust and adaptive control strategies are required to achieve high performance in these dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive model predictive controller that combines model predictive control (MPC) with an underlying $\mathcal{L}_{1}$ adaptive controller to improve trajectory tracking of a system subject to unknown and changing disturbances. The $\mathcal{L}_{1}$ adaptive controller forces the system to behave in a predefined way, as specified by a reference model. A higher-level model predictive controller then uses this reference model to calculate the optimal reference input based on a cost function, while taking into account input and state constraints. We focus on the experimental validation of the proposed approach and demonstrate its effectiveness in experiments on a quadrotor. We show that the proposed approach has a lower trajectory tracking error compared to non-predictive, adaptive approaches and a predictive, nonadaptive approach, even when external wind disturbances are applied.

This article is focused on the high-performance trajectory tracking control of single actuator of a hydraulic excavator. A novel adaptive neural finite-time controller without tedious offline parameter identification and the complex backstepping scheme is put forward. By employing a coordinate transform, the original system can be represented in a canonical form. Consequently, the control objective is retained by controlling the transformed system, which allows a simple controller design without using backstepping. To estimate the immeasurable states of the transformed system, a high-order sliding mode observer is employed, of which observation error is guaranteed to be bounded in finite time. To guarantee finite-time trajectory tracking performance, an adaptive neural finite-time controller based on neural network approximation and terminal sliding mode theory is synthesized. During its synthesis, an echo state network is used to approximate the lumped uncertain system functions, and it guarantees an improved approximation with online-updated output weights. Besides, to handle the lumped uncertain nonlinearities resulting from observation error and neural approximation error, a robust term is employed. The influences of the uncertain nonlinearities are restrained with a novel parameter adaption law, which estimates and updates the upper bound of the lumped uncertain nonlinearities online. With this novel controller, the finite-time trajectory tracking error convergence is proved theoretically. The superior performance and the practical applicability of the proposed method are verified by comparative simulations and experiments.

This paper explores lane changing trajectory planning and tracking control for intelligent vehicle on curved road. A novel arcs trajectory is planned for the desired lane changing trajectory. A kinematic controller and a dynamics controller are designed to implement the trajectory tracking control. Firstly, the kinematic model and dynamics model of intelligent vehicle with non-holonomic constraint are established. Secondly, two constraints of lane changing on curved road in practice (LCCP) are proposed. Thirdly, two arcs with same curvature are constructed for the desired lane changing trajectory. According to the geometrical characteristics of arcs trajectory, equations of desired state can be calculated. Finally, the backstepping method is employed to design a kinematic trajectory tracking controller. Then the sliding-mode dynamics controller is designed to ensure that the motion of the intelligent vehicle can follow the desired velocity generated by kinematic controller. The stability of control system is proved by Lyapunov theory. Computer simulation demonstrates that the desired arcs trajectory and state curves with B-spline optimization can meet the requirements of LCCP constraints and the proposed control schemes can make tracking errors to converge uniformly.

Robust adaptive three-dimensional trajectory tracking control for unmanned underwater vehicles with disturbances and uncertain dynamics

A quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) must achieve desired flight missions despite internal uncertainties and external disturbances. This paper proposes an adaptive trajectory tracking control method that attenuates unknown uncertainties and disturbances. Although the quadrotor is underactuated, a fully actuated controller is designed using backstepping control. To avoid repeated derivatives of control inputs, a dynamic surface method introduces a filter and auxiliary controller. Lyapunov criteria guide adaptive laws for tuning controller gain and filters. A low-power observer is integrated for state estimation. Additionally, a disturbance observer is developed and combined with the control scheme to handle unknown disturbances. Simulations on a DJI F450 quadrotor demonstrate that the proposed control algorithm offers strong trajectory-tracking performance and system stability under multiple uncertainties and external disturbances during flight.