Robust Adaptive Control for Constrained Tilt-Rotor Quadcopters of Unknown Inertial Properties

Abstract

This paper analyzes the dynamics of tilt-rotor quadcopters with H-configuration and synthesizes a control system for these vehicles. Our analysis is the first to show a nonlinear effect in the vehicle's rotational dynamics due to the fact that not all propellers of a tilt-rotor are aligned to one of the vehicle's principal axes. The proposed control system relies on an original robust model reference adaptive control law to guarantee user-defined constraints on both the trajectory tracking error and the adaptive gains at all despite parametric, matched, and unmatched uncertainties due to unknown external disturbances and dangling payloads.