On the Design of Digital Event-Based Controllers for a Class of Nonlinear Systems: an Application to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In the last decade, control systems for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been an important topic in research due to their increasing usage in many practical fields, and have been extensively studied by resorting to classical continuous-time nonlinear design. Although this approach can simultaneously incorporate different control requirements in the design, the computed control laws are approximated and applied within digital environments in absence of formal performance guarantees. In this work, we present a methodology for the design of dynamic quantized sampled-data event-based stabilizers for a class of time-varying nonlinear systems at the aims of applying the proposed strategy to the autonomous navigation problem of UAVs. Starting from classical nonlinear design achieving tracking of prescribed trajectories in continuous time (emulation approach), we prove the existence of a suitably fast sampling and of an accurate quantization of the input/output channels ensuring the practical stability of the error dynamics by means of quantized sampled-data event-based controllers. Simulations performed in an non-ideal setting confirm the potential of the approach.