Accurate flight path tracking control for powered parafoil aerial vehicle using ADRC-based wind feedforward compensation

Winds are the major contributors to the tracking error in the control process of the powered parafoil, making it difficult to achieve better control performance. To address this problem, an accurate flight path tracking control approach for the powered parafoil combining active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) and wind feedforward compensation is proposed. The wind impacts on the lateral heading and longitudinal altitude dynamics of the powered parafoil are analyzed firstly. Moreover, the wind feedforward compensation control, the lateral heading and longitudinal altitude tracking controller are designed to directly compensate the wind disturbance in the control process, such that the tracking precision and disturbance-rejection capacity can be enhanced simultaneously. Eventually, the mathematical simulation, robustness test, and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed control approach achieve better tracking performance and robustness against the variable wind disturbance than the conventional ADRC and PID.