Abstract
This paper deals with new tracking control problems for moving vehicle robots in three-dimensional space such as single/multi-rotor helicopter, airship, airplane and submarine. The robots are nonholonomic systems described by a set of nonlinear equations and some parameters of the dynamics are subjected to uncertainies. This paper presents new practical tracking controllers to reduce the tracking error less than or equal to any specified positive value for a given desired trajectory asymptotically. By introducing this allowable tracking error, the tracking control problem of the robot system can be reduced to that of a simple linear system. This approach makes the well-known linear control theory applicable in the control design. Moreover, a new adaptive practical tracking controller with online parameter estimation is proposed. A numerical simulation is performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.
