Adaptive Robust Tracking Control for Aerial Work Platform Vehicle with Guaranteed Prescribed Performance

An aerial work platform vehicle (AWPV) plays a crucial role in conducting industrial activities at elevated heights, but its tracking control presents significant challenges due to complex nonlinearities and uncertainties. This study introduces a constraint-based adaptive robust control approach for AWPV that reliably achieves trajectory tracking while ensuring prescribed transient and steady-state performance (PTSSP). The control strategy takes into account time-variant uncertainties with unknown bounds, which may change rapidly and irregularly. The desired trajectories and PTSSP are respectively formulated as equality and inequality servo constraints. To incorporate the inequality servo constraints into the equality ones, a diffeomorphism approach is employed, leading to the formulation of new equality servo constraints. Consequently, the control task transforms into guiding the AWPV to adhere to the new equality servo constraints. Accordingly, an adaptive robust control method is designed to follow these constraints, incorporating an adaptive law for estimating online uncertainty bounds and compensating for uncertainties. Notably, no approximations or linearizations are utilized. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed AWPV tracking control approach are rigorously validated through proofs and simulation results. This represents a pioneering effort in uncertain AWPV tracking control while ensuring PTSSP.