Adaptive Attitude Control of a Rigid Body With Input and Output Quantization

In this article, the adaptive attitude-tracking problem of a rigid body is investigated, where the input and output are transmitted via a network. To reduce the communication burden in a network, a quantizer is introduced in both uplink and downlink communication channels. An adaptive backstepping-based control scheme is developed for a class of multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) rigid body systems. The proposed control algorithm can overcome the difficulty to proceed with the recursive design of virtual controls with quantized output vector, and a new approach to stability analysis is developed by constructing a new compensation scheme for the effects of the vector output quantization and input quantization. It is shown that all closed-loop signals are ensured uniformly bounded and the tracking errors converge to a compact set containing the origin. Experiments on a 2 degrees-of-freedom helicopter system illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.