Quantized Control Capable of Appointed-Time Performances for Quadrotor Attitude Tracking: Experimental Validation

Abstract

In this article, a quantized control capable of appointed-time performances for quadrotor attitude tracking is investigated. A continuous and piecewise behavior boundary, rather than an exponential decaying function employed in traditional prescribed performance control, is devised using error transformation to enforce attitude convergence to preassigned transient and steady zones in an appointed time. To circumvent the inertia moment uncertainties and external perturbations, an extended state observer with only one parameter to be tuned is introduced to precisely estimate the total disturbances acting on the angular rate subsystem. Additionally, a hysteretic quantizer capable of converting continuous control behaviors to finite discrete scalars is established in a controller to actuator channel to reduce the transmission burden and amount of sampling data. With a novel quantization decomposition, an attitude quantized controller is integrated in terms of guaranteed tracking. The prominent feature is that a prescribed appointed-time attitude response can be preserved with a decreased demand of communication bandwidth, despite uncertainties. Theoretical analysis shows that all error signals are ultimately uniformly bounded. Eventually, the superiority of explored control strategy is demonstrated through experimental results.