Disturbance observer based backstepping controller for a quadcopter

Abstract

The Disturbance observer is becoming very popular and is being mainly used in high speed motion control applications where high precision is required. This paper focus on the problem of designing a nonlinear disturbance observer for good estimation of external disturbances acting on the body of quadcopter during flying for attitude, altitude as well as position regulation control problem. The proposed controller is based on composite controller scheme, consists of a nonlinear disturbance observer and a Backstepping controller.The stability analysis of the nonlinear disturbance observer is successfully done using Lyapunov stability theory. The effectiveness of the proposed disturbance observer is investigated by MATLAB simulation. The simulation results shows that Backstepping controller with nonlinear disturbance observer has good tracking ability in the presence of external disturbance.