Spacecraft output feedback attitude control based on extended state observer and adaptive dynamic programming

This paper investigates spacecraft output feedback attitude control problem based on extended state observer (ESO) and adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) approach. For the plant described by the unit quaternion, an ESO is first presented in view of the property of the attitude motion, and the norm constraint on the unit quaternion can be satisfied theoretically. The practical convergence proof of the developed ESO is illustrated by change of coordinates. Then, the controller is designed with an involvement of two parts: the basic part and the supplementary part. For the basic part, a proportional-derivative control law is designed. For the supplementary part, an ADP method called action-dependent heuristic dynamic programming (ADHDP) is adopted, which provides a supplementary control action according to the differences between the actual and the desired system signals. Simulation studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

Integrated guidance and control strategy for homing of unmanned underwater vehicles

This paper presents a novel integrated guidance and control strategy for homing of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) in 5-degree-of-freedom (DOF), where the vehicles are assumed to be underactuated at high speed and required to move towards the final docking path. During the initial homing stage, the guidance system is first designed by geometrical analysis method to generate a feasible reference trajectory. Then, in the backstepping framework, the proposed trajectory tracking controller can achieve all the tracking errors in the closed-loop system convergence to a small neighbourhood of zero. It means that the vehicle's dynamics are consistent with the reference trajectory derived in the previous step. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed guidance and control strategy, the complete stability analysis used Lyapunov's method is given in the paper, and simulation results of all initial conditions are presented and discussed.     

Fault-tolerant anti-windup control for hypersonic vehicles in reentry based on ISMDO

Due to the extreme large flight scale of Hypersonic Vehicle (HSV), the system inevitably possesses strong nonlinearity, coupling, fast time-variability and is also sensitive to disturbance and fault. The method of external anti-windup system combined with the terminal sliding mode control law (TSMC) is presented for the nonlinear control problem under the restriction of control surfaces for HSV. It can realize the compensation for the control surface saturation and let the HSV smoothly track the command signals. Then, the improved sliding mode disturbance observer (ISMDO) is proposed to estimate unknown parameters and strong external disturbance as well as the unknown actuator fault. This method does not need the information of disturbance and the fault bounds and has fewer learning parameters, which makes it suitable for the real-time control. Finally, the simulation test of attitude control for the reentry HSV is conducted, and the results show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed scheme.     

Backstepping-based adaptive dynamic programming for missile-target guidance systems with state and input constraints

In this paper, a novel backstepping-based adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) method is developed to solve the problem of intercepting a maneuver target in the presence of full-state and input constraints. To address state constraints, a barrier Lyapunov function is introduced to every backstepping procedure. An auxiliary design system is employed to compensate the input constraints. Then, an adaptive backstepping feedforward control strategy is designed, by which the tracking problem for strict-feedback systems can be reduced to an equivalence optimal regulation problem for affine nonlinear systems. Secondly, an adaptive optimal controller is developed by using ADP technique, in which a critic network is constructed to approximate the solution of the associated Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB) equation. Therefore, the whole control scheme consists of an adaptive feedforward controller and an optimal feedback controller. By utilizing Lyapunov's direct method, all signals in the closed-loop system are guaranteed to be uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB). Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed strategy is demonstrated by using a simple nonlinear system and a nonlinear two-dimensional missile-target interception system.     

Observer based sliding mode controller for vehicles with roll dynamics

In this work, considering the roll dynamics and actuator dynamics, an observer-based control scheme for a vehicle is proposed. The proposal considers a nonlinear higher order sliding mode observer to estimate unmeasurable lateral velocity, roll angle and roll velocity. Using the observer information, a controller based on block control with sliding mode technique is designed for the reference trajectory tracking of the lateral and yaw velocities of the vehicle. The stability of the complete closed-loop system including zero dynamics is analyzed. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated through CarSim simulations.     

Source localization using TDOA and FDOA measurements based on semidefinite programming and reformulation linearization

The problem of source localization using time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) and frequency-difference-of-arrival (FDOA) measurements has been widely studied. It is commonly formulated as a weighted least squares (WLS) problem with quadratic equality constraints. Due to the nonconvex nature of this formulation, it is difficult to produce a global solution. To tackle this issue, semidefinite programming (SDP) is utilized to convert the WLS problem to a convex optimization problem. However, the SDP-based methods will suffer obvious performance degradation when the noise level is high. In this paper, we devise a new localization solution using the SDP together with reformulation-linearization technique (RLT). Specifically, we firstly apply the RLT strategy to convert the WLS problem to a convex problem, and then add the SDP constraint to tighten the feasible region of the resultant formulation. Moreover, this solution is also extended for cases when there are sensor position and velocity errors. Numerical results show that our solution has significant accuracy advantages over the existing localization schemes at high noise levels.     

Intermittent control to stationary distribution and exponential stability for hybrid multi-stochastic-weight coupled networks based on aperiodicity

In this paper, the issue about the stationary distribution for hybrid multi-stochastic-weight coupled networks (HMSWCN) via aperiodically intermittent control is investigated. Specially, when stochastic disturbance gets to zero, the exponential stability in pth moment for hybrid multi-weight coupled networks (HMWCN) is considered. Under the framework of the Lyapunov method, M-matrix and Kirchhoff’s Matrix Tree Theorem in the graph theory, several sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee the existence of a stationary distribution and exponential stability. Different from previous work, the existing area of a stationary distribution is not only related to the topological structure of coupled networks, but also aperiodically intermittent control (the rate of control width and control duration). Subsequently, as an application to theoretical results, a class of hybrid multi-stochastic-weight coupled oscillators is studied. Ultimately, numerical examples are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of theoretical results and effects of the control schemes.     

Nash Bargaining Solution based rendezvous guidance of unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper addresses a finite-time rendezvous problem for a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), in the absence of a leader or a reference trajectory. When the UAVs do not cooperate, they are assumed to use Nash equilibrium strategies (NES). However, when the UAVs can communicate among themselves, they can implement cooperative game theoretic strategies for mutual benefit. In a convex linear quadratic differential game (LQDG), a Pareto-optimal solution (POS) is obtained when the UAVs jointly minimize a team cost functional, which is constructed through a convex combination of individual cost functionals. This paper proposes an algorithm to determine the convex combination of weights corresponding to the Pareto-optimal Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS), which offers each UAV a lower cost than that incurred from the NES. Conditions on the cost functions that make the proposed algorithm converge to the NBS are presented. A UAV, programmed to choose its strategies at a given time based upon cost-to-go estimates for the rest of the game duration, may switch to NES finding it to be more beneficial than continuing with a cooperative strategy it previously agreed upon with the other UAVs. For such scenarios, a renegotiation method, that makes use of the proposed algorithm to obtain the NBS corresponding to the state of the game at an intermediate time, is proposed. This renegotiation method helps to establish cooperation between UAVs and prevents non-cooperative behaviour. In this context, the conditions of time consistency of a cooperative solution have been derived in connection to LQDG. The efficacy of the guidance law derived from the proposed algorithm is illustrated through simulations.     

Disturbance observer-based robust missile autopilot design with full-state constraints via adaptive dynamic programming

This paper aims to develop a robust optimal control method for longitudinal dynamics of missile systems with full-state constraints suffering from mismatched disturbances by using adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) technique. First, the constrained states are mapped by smooth functions, thus, the considered systems become nonlinear systems without state constraints subject to unknown approximation error. In order to estimate the unknown disturbances, a nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO) is designed. Based on the output of disturbance observer, an integral sliding mode controller (ISMC) is derived to counteract the effects of disturbances and unknown approximation error, thus ensuring the stability of nonlinear systems. Subsequently, the ADP technique is utilized to learn an adaptive optimal controller for the nominal systems, in which a critic network is constructed with a novel weight update law. By utilizing the Lyapunov's method, the stability of the closed-loop system and the convergence of the estimation weight for critic network are guaranteed. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed controller are demonstrated by using longitudinal dynamics of a missile.     

Distributed fusion in wireless sensor networks based on a novel event-triggered strategy

In this paper, the event-triggered distributed multi-sensor data fusion algorithm is presented for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) based on a new event-triggered strategy. The threshold of the event is set according to the chi-square distribution that is constructed by the difference of the measurement of the current time and the measurement of the last sampled moment. When the event-triggered decision variable value is larger than the threshold, the event is triggered and the observation is sampled for state estimation. In designing the dynamic event-triggered strategy, we relate the threshold with the quantity in the chi-square distribution table. Therefore, compared to the existed event-triggered algorithms, this novel event-triggered strategy can give the specific sampling/communication rate directly and intuitively. In addition, for the presented distributed fusion in wireless sensor networks, only the measurements in the neighborhood (i.e., the neighbor nodes and the neighbor’s neighbor nodes) of the fusion center are fused so that it can obtain the optimal state estimation under limited energy consumption. A numerical example is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the presented algorithm.     

An integrated data-driven Markov parameters sequence identification and adaptive dynamic programming method to design fault-tolerant optimal tracking control for completely unknown model systems

In this paper, an integrated design of data-driven fault-tolerant tracking control is addressed relying on the Markov parameters sequence identification and adaptive dynamic programming techniques. For the unknown model systems, the sequence of Markov parameters together with the covariance of innovation signal is firstly estimated by least square method. After a transformation of value function from stochastic to deterministic, a policy iteration adaptive dynamic programming algorithm is then formulated to find the optimal tracking control law. In order to eliminate the influence of unpredicted faults, an active fault-tolerant supervisory control strategy is further constructed by synthesizing fault detection, isolation, estimation and compensation. All these involved designs are performed in the data-driven manner, and thus avoid the information requirement about system drift dynamics. From the perspective of system operation management, the above integrated control scheme provides a framework to achieve the tracking performance optimization, monitoring and maintaining simultaneously. The effectiveness of these conclusions is finally verified via two case studies.     

Nonlinear trajectory tracking controller for a class of robotic vehicles

A global state feedback tracking controller for a class of vehicles, namely marine vehicles, hovercrafts and indoor airships is considered in this paper. The control algorithm uses a velocity transformation of the vehicle equations of motion. It is shown that this algorithm is suitable for control of fully actuated systems and leads to fast response. This property arises from the fact that the dynamical couplings in the vehicle are taken into account in the control gain matrix. A Lyapunov-like function is proposed for the stability analysis of the system under the controller. The algorithms robustness issue is considered too. Numerical simulations are given to illustrate effectiveness of the approach.     

On the approximate discrete KLT of fractional Brownian motion and applications

This paper establishes connection between discrete cosine transform (DCT) and the discrete-time fractional Brownian motion process (dfBm). It is proved that the eigenvectors of the auto-covariance matrix of a dfBm can be approximated by DCT basis vectors in the asymptotic sense. This shows that DCT basis acts as discrete Karhunen–Loève transform (DKLT) for these processes in the approximate sense. Analytic perturbation theory of linear operators is used to prove this result. This result will be of great practical significance in applications where one is looking for an appropriate basis to work with signals that can perhaps be modeled as belonging to fBm processes. The utility of the proposed work has been illustrated with two real-life data (a) on compressive sampling based reconstruction of financial time-series and (b) in denoising gravitational wave event GW150914 data obtained from a binary black hole merger.     

Dynamic output feedback sliding mode control for spacecraft hovering without velocity measurements

In consideration of target angular velocity uncertainty and external disturbance, a modified dynamic output feedback sliding mode control (DOFSMC) method is proposed for spacecraft autonomous hovering system without velocity measurements. As a stepping-stone, an additional dynamic compensator is introduced into the design of sliding surface, then an augmented system is reconstructed with the system uncertainty and external disturbance. Based on the linear matrix inequality (LMI), a sufficient condition is given, which guarantees the disturbance attenuation performance of sliding mode dynamics. By introducing an auxiliary variable, a modified version of adaptive sliding mode control (ASMC) law is designed, and the finite-time stability of sliding variable is established by the Lyapunov stability theory. Compared with other results, the proposed method is less conservative and can decrease the generated control input force significantly. Finally, two simulation examples are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Finite-time sliding mode attitude control for rigid spacecraft without angular velocity measurement

The continuous finite-time nonsingular terminal sliding mode (NTSM) attitude tracking control for rigid spacecraft is investigated. Firstly, a finite-time attitude controller combined with a new adaptive update law is designed. Different from existing controllers, the proposed controller is inherently continuous and the chattering is effectively reduced. Then, an adaptive model-free finite-time state observer (AMFFTSO) and an angular velocity calculation algorithm (AVCA) are developed to estimate the unknown angular velocity. The unique feature of the proposed method is that the finite-time estimation of angular velocity is achieved and no prior knowledge of quaternion derivative upper bound is needed. Next, based on the estimated angular velocity, a finite-time attitude controller with only attitude measurement is developed. Finally, some simulations are presented and the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is illustrated.     

Event-triggered adaptive fault-tolerant control for nonlinear systems fusing static and dynamic information

In this paper, a novel event-triggered adaptive fault-tolerant control scheme is proposed for a class of nonlinear systems with unknown actuator faults. Multiplicative faults and additive faults are taken into account simultaneously, both of which may vary with time. Different from existing results, our controller fuses static reliability information and dynamic online information, which is helpful to enhance the fault-tolerant capability. With the aid of an event-triggering mechanism, an actuator switching strategy and a bound estimation approach, the communication burden is significantly reduced and the impacts of the actuator faults as well as the network-induced error are effectively compensated for. Moreover, by employing the prescribed performance control technique, the system tracking error can converge to a predefined arbitrarily small residual set with prescribed convergence rate and maximum overshoot, which implies that the proposed scheme is able to ensure rapid and accurate tracking. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

A hybrid partial feedback linearization and deadbeat control scheme for a nonlinear gantry crane

This paper presents the design of a hybrid partial feedback linearization and deadbeat control scheme for a nonlinear gantry crane with friction to control its position and sway angle. The partial feedback linearization is used to linearize the nonlinear model and to stabilize its internal dynamics. In many crane applications, it's necessary to accelerate the system response. As a result, this will cause oscillation in the position as well as the sway angle. So, the deadbeat controller is added to get the desirable accelerated response without any oscillation or adverse effects on the internal dynamics stability. By using Lyapunov stability method, the proposed scheme is proved to be globally stable, with converging tracking errors to the desired performance. The simulation results are accomplished to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and to demonstrate its reliability to control crane systems with comparative results.     

Explicit condition for consensus of third-order discrete-time multi-agent systems without accelerated velocity measurements

This paper investigates the consensus problem for third-order discrete-time multi-agent systems in directed networks. For the case when each agent can only receive the information of position and velocity from its neighbors, necessary and sufficient conditions for consensus have been proposed. In contrast to the preceding work, we not only present the exact consensus value, but also illustrate the influence of scaling parameters and nonzero eigenvalues of the involved Laplacian matrix on consensus. Two numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the obtained results.     

Event-triggered and quantized self-triggered control for multi-agent systems based on relative state measurements

This paper studies the consensus problem of multi-agent systems by event- and self-triggered control. An event-triggered algorithm with periodic event detection and relative state measurements is designed to determine all event times. Furthermore, a self-triggered control algorithm with periodic event detection and quantization is proposed to further reduce resource consumption. In the proposed control strategies, only relative state information, or called edge information, is utilized by controllers, and all edge state information incident to each agent is processed together. The results are illustrated by two numerical experiments.     

Event-based dynamic output-feedback controller design for networked control systems with sensor and actuator saturations

This paper is concerned with the problem of event-triggered dynamic output-feedback H_∞ control for networked control system with sensor and actuator saturations. The event-triggered scheme combined with sensor saturation is first introduced to judge whether the newly sampled signal should be transmitted to the dynamic output-feedback controller or not. Under this scheme, the concurrent closed-loop system is first modeled as a control system with an interval time-varying delay and nonlinear items. Through constructing the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional and employing linear matrix inequality approach, sufficient conditions for H_∞ asymptotical stability are derived for the networked control system; furthermore, under the above stability condition, a dynamic output-feedback controller and the corresponding event-triggered parameters are co-designed through linear matrix inequality approach. Lastly, a numerical example is employed to prove the practical utility of this method.