Trajectory Tracking and Disturbance Rejection for Quadrotor Helicopter by a Novel Method

Abstract

Various control problems for quadrotor helicopter have been studied in the literature. In this paper, we will study the trajectory tracking and disturbance rejection problem for a generic model of quadrotor helicopter with the attitude being represented by unit quatemion. In our problem formulation, the translational dynamics of the system are subject to external disturbances generated by an exosystem, the position reference trajectory is also generated by the exosystem, and the attitude reference trajectory is some smooth time function. We deal with the attitude control and the position control by feedback linearization and output regulation theory, respectively. We show that, by appropriately specifying the attitude reference trajectory, our problem is solvable by combining the attitude control law and the position control law. A numerical example is used to illustrate our design.