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

Guoyuan Qi,Xitong Guo,Xia Li,Shengli Ma,Jianchuan Guo

doi:10.3390/electronics9122001

Guoyuan Qi, Xitong Guo + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9122001

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Journal: Electronics	Publication Date: Nov 25, 2020
Citations: 8	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Tianjin Polytechnic University

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.

Highlights

Quadrotor flying platforms are a class of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that have been widely applied in exploration [1,2], transportation [3], cooperative pursuit [4], and so on
The quadrotor model was analyzed to fit the form of the affine nonlinear system used for the high-order differential feedback control (HODFC)
The HODFC scheme based on the fifth high order differentiator (HOD) was applied to the quadrotor, which acts as a position controller in the semi-autopilot experimental platform

Summary

Introduction

Quadrotor flying platforms are a class of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that have been widely applied in exploration [1,2], transportation [3], cooperative pursuit [4], and so on. It is challenging to design a reliable controller for quadrotors because of their under-actuated, nonlinearity, strong coupling, static instability and abundant dynamic behavior in the attitude system [5]. The control strategies applied to the quadrotor are mainly divided into model-dependent control and model-independent control [6]. Model-dependent control mostly requires knowing the exact mathematical model of the system. The sliding mode control (SMC) is a typical method based on the system model. Mu et al [7] investigated a novel integral SMC strategy for waypoint tracking control of a quadrotor. The problem is that in actual engineering, the accurate mathematical models of the systems cannot be obtained because of the unmodeled dynamics, uncertainties and unknown disturbances, such as wind disturbance, actuator failure and configurations of bobweight

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Results

Conclusion