Trajectory Control of a Quadrotor Subject to 2D Wind Disturbances

The paper addresses the flight control of a quad-rotor subject to two dimensional unknown static/varying wind disturbances. A model separation is proposed to simplify the control of the six-degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) nonlinear dynamics of the flying robot. Such approach allows to deal with quad-rotor's 3D-motion via two subsystems: dynamic (altitude and MAV-relative forward velocity) and kinematic (nonholonomic-like navigation) subsystems. In terms of control, a hierarchical control is used as the overall control structure to stabilize the kinematic underactuaded subsystem. A control strategy based on sliding-mode and adaptive control techniques is proposed to deal with slow and fast time-varying wind conditions, respectively. This choice not only provides well tracking control but also improves the estimation of unknown disturbance. The backstepping technique is used to stabilize the inner-loop heading dynamics, such recursive design takes into account a constrained heading rate. Promising simulations results show the validity of the proposed control strategy while tracking a time-parameterized straight-line and sinusoidal trajectory.