Predefined-time control design for tracking chaotic trajectories around a contour with an UAV

Abstract

The surveillance or monitoring of places is crucial to ensuring security, protecting people and assets, preventing crimes, and detecting emergencies, to mention some. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play a vital role in these applications, offering versatility, agility, and aerial vision. A crucial step for such tasks is to protect the UAV path ahead. This paper focuses on a methodology harnessing the unpredictable nature of chaotic systems to generate trajectories around a closed area or contour. However, although a vast quantity of research papers mention the use of chaotic path generation, they have yet to learn about the control system and the dynamics affecting the UAV, where developing the control theory is challenging. In this paper, we design controllers based on predetermined-time stability, ensuring the achievement of the desired trajectory before a specified time. Additionally, adjusting control parameters is a crucial step during the control design, impacting the control performance. Hence, we present a method to optimize and adapt controller parameters through evolutionary optimization, demonstrating precision enhancement. We validate the proposed system’s performance and the controllers through numerical simulations, indicating that the UAV effectively and accurately follows some types of chaotic trajectories like a square contour, aiming at the feasibility of this methodology in real UAV surveillance applications.