Global tracking control of a VTOL aircraft without velocity measurements

This note develops a nonlinear output-feedback controller to force a nonminimum phase, under-actuated vertical take-off and landing aircraft to globally asymptotically track a reference trajectory generated by a reference model. The control development is based on a global exponential observer, some global coordinate transformations, Lyapunov’s direct method and an extension of the backstepping technique. Interestingly, the proposed methodology also yields new results for the previously studied problems of stabilization and output tracking or regulation. Numerical simulations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.