Enhanced Backstepping Controller Design with Application to Autonomous Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an underactuated multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) system which has nonlinear dynamic behavior such as high coupling degree and unknown nonlinearities. It is a great challenge to design a quadrotor control system due to these features. In this paper, the contribution is focused on the backstepping-based robust control design of the quadrotor UAV. Firstly, the dynamic model of the aerial vehicle is mathematically formulated. Then, a robust controller is designed for the stabilization and tracking control of the vehicle. The developed robust control system comprises a backstepping and a proportional-derivative (PD) controller. Backstepping is a recursive design methodology that uses Lyapunov theorem which can guarantee the stability of the nominal model system, while PD control is used to attenuate the effects caused by system uncertainties. For the problem of determining the backstepping control parameters, particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm has been employed. In addition, the genetic algorithm (GA) technique is also adopted for the purpose of performance comparison with PSO scheme. Finally, the designed controller is experimentally evaluated on a quadrotor simulation environment to demonstrate the effectiveness and merits of the theoretical development.