Tracking in scale quad-rotors through adaptive augmentation

Abstract

This paper illustrates the application of an adaptive flight control architecture to a scale quad-rotor. For autonomous vertical takeoff and landing flight, it is common to separate the control problem into an inner fast loop that controls attitude and an outer slow loop that controls the trajectory tracking. In this paper, we augment a conventional proportional and derivative controller conceived mainly for hovering, with an adaptive element using a real-time tuning single hidden layer neural network in a inner–outer loop combined architecture to account for model inversion error cancelation, issued in the feedback linearization process. The results shown in simulations reveal the superior performance of the augmented controller in tracking maneuvers.