High-Order Differential Feedback Control for Quadrotor UAV: Theory and Experimentation

Abstract

A model-independent control strategy called high-order differential feedback control (HODFC) is applied to a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (QUAV) based on a semi-autopilot indoor optical positioning system. The affine system form of the quadrotor model is provided to facilitate the design of the HODFC. A fifth-order high order differentiator (HOD) is introduced to estimate with high precision the derivatives of the reference input and the QUAV system’s states. A filtering signal of the control output is incorporated in the control law to overcome the system model’s unknown part in the HODFC scheme. The stability of both the HODFC and the HOD are proved. The physical and straightforward parameters are provided to make the HODFC scheme for the QUAV easy to operate. The real-time trajectory tracking experiments with varied reference trajectories and disturbances are carried out to illustrate the superior performance of the HODFC versus the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) method, in terms of the mean of absolute error, the integral of absolute error and the integral of the time-weighted absolute error. The results also demonstrate that the HODFC has superiority in static and dynamic trajectory tracking, especially when the system is disturbed.