Quadcopter Adaptive Trajectory Tracking Control: A New Approach via Backstepping Technique

Abstract

Nowadays, quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicles play important roles in several real-world applications and the improvement of their control performance has become an increasingly attractive topic of a great number of studies. In this paper, we present a new approach for the design and stability analysis of a quadcopter adaptive trajectory tracking control. Based on the quadcopter nonlinear dynamics model which is obtained by using the Euler–Lagrange approach, the tracking controller is devised via the backstepping control technique. Besides, an adaptive law is proposed to deal with the system parameterized uncertainties and to guarantee that the control input is finite. In addition, the vehicle’s vertical descending acceleration is ensured to not exceed the gravitational acceleration by making use of a barrier Lyapunov function. It is shown that the suitable parameter estimator is stable and the tracking errors are guaranteed to be asymptotically stable simultaneously. By prescribing certain flight conditions, we use numerical simulations to compare the control performance of our method to that of existing approaches. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Dynamic Event-Triggered Time-Varying Formation Control of Second-Order Dynamic Agents: Application to Multiple Quadcopters Systems

“…Quadcopters, which are one of the most active classes of UAVs, have two pairs of motors to adjust their altitude and attitude. The reasons why quadcopters have been widely researched in many recent studies are that their practical models shrink in experiments for safety, and they have enough actuators to control their rigid body states including position and orientation [33][34][35][36]. In considering the formation control of multiple quadcopters, each agent can be treated as a point-mass system, and the outer loop dynamic model is described as a second-order dynamics.…”

“…By following this procedure, the thrust force U 1,i (t) and desired roll, pitch, and yaw angle are calculated in the companion computer before being published to the inner loop. It can be assumed that the attitude is able to track immediately the desired one in the inner loop (refer to [33][34][35][44][45][46]).…”

Autonomous Quadcopter Precision Landing Onto a Heaving Platform: New Method and Experiment

“…Additionally, the ground effect and external disturbances can further complicate the design of controllers for the quadcopter. In order to deal with the control problem of such systems, a number of control algorithms were studied, such as a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller in [4], backstepping method in [5], a robust sliding mode controller (SMC) in [6], a second-order SMC subject to a known mismatched term in [7], a disturbance-observer-based robust algorithm coping with unpredictable time-varying disturbances in [8], and a resilient approach in [9]. Although many control techniques were investigated, designing highperformance controllers for quadcopters remains challenging and is widely undertaken in the scientific community.…”

Finite-Time Trajectory Tracking Control of Output-Constrained Uncertain Quadrotor

“…The integral BLF is used in conjunction with backstepping and vision-based control in [28] to restrict drastic attitude motion. The BLF based backstepping is implemented on quadrotor and performance is compared with PID and SMC in [29]. Some recent developments have been made on the design of SMC for output constrained systems.…”