Large-scale stabilization control of input-constrained quadrotor

Abstract

The quadrotor has been the most popular aircraft in the last decade due to its excellent dynamics and continues to attract everincreasing research interest. Delivering a quadrotor from a large fixed-wing aircraft is a promising application of quadrotors. In such an application, the quadrotor needs to switch from a highly unstable status, featured as large initial states, to a safe and stable flight status. This is the so-called large-scale stability control problem. In such an extreme scenario, the quadrotor is at risk of actuator saturation. This can cause the controller to update incorrectly and lead the quadrotor to spiral and crash. In this article, to safely control the quadrotor in such scenarios, the control input constraint is analyzed. The key states of a quadrotor dynamic model are selected, and a two-dimensional dynamic model is extracted based on a symmetrical body configuration. A generalized point-wise min-norm nonlinear control method is proposed based on the Lyapunov function, and large-scale stability control is hence achieved. An enhanced point-wise, min-norm control is further provided to improve the attitude control performance, with altitude performance degenerating slightly. Simulation results showed that the proposed control methods can stabilize the input-constrained quadrotor and the enhanced method can improve the performance of the quadrotor in critical states.