Robust Adaptive Control for a Quadrotor UAV With Uncertain Aerodynamic Parameters

• Published in: IEEE transactions on aerospace and electronic systems 2023-12, Vol.59 (6), p.1-15
• Main Authors: Wang, Junan, Zhu, Bing, Zheng, Zewei
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adaptation models; Adaptive control; Aerodynamics; Autonomous aerial vehicles; Background noise; Backstepping; Closed loops; Continuity (mathematics); Control systems design; Controllers; Damping; Design parameters; disturbances; Drag coefficients; Euler angles; Feedback control; Global Positioning System; Lipschitz condition; Mathematical models; Noise measurement; Parameter uncertainty; Proportional integral derivative; quadrotor; Quadrotors; Robust control; Rotary wing aircraft; Tracking errors; Trigonometric functions; Unmanned aerial vehicles
• ISSN: 0018-9251; 1557-9603
• DOI: 10.1109/TAES.2023.3303133

In controller design for quadrotors, the drag coefficients, thrust coefficients and aerodynamic damping coefficients are usually un-measurable, and they have to be regarded as uncertain parameters. Meanwhile, the position information provided by the GPS receiver is easy to get disturbed by environmental noise. A backstepping-based robust adaptive control scheme is proposed in this paper to address uncertain parameters, bounded external disturbances and the noise in measurement. The proposed approach overcomes singularities resulted from using inverse trigonometric functions of Euler angles. A continuous function is introduced to replace signum functions, such that the closed-loop system satisfies Lipschitz condition. Boundedness of estimation errors and tracking errors are guaranteed by the proposed approach and their boundary can be modified. The advantages of the proposed controller are supported by numerical examples and experimental results, where comparisons with PID, backstepping, geometric control and the other existing robust adaptive controller are provided.