Robust control for a quadrotor aircraft with small overshoot and high-precision position tracking performance

A tracking control problem for a quadrotor aircraft with external disturbances and model uncertainties is considered. An error manifold involving the velocity and position tracking error is used to handle the dynamics of the translational subsystem. Novel performance functions combined with primary conditions are designed to drive the error manifold into a prescribed envelope, which ensures a small overshoot and avoids control singularity. A control-oriented non-affine model for the angular velocity subsystem is utilized to ensure a better applicability of the controller. By means of backstepping technology, prescribed performance controller is constructed for the ro-tational subsystem. Different from the existing flight control methods, no estimator or conservative assumption is adopted to solve the coupling term between the rotational and translational subsystems in this paper. The proposed methodology is estimation-free and independent of exact knowledge of the model parameters. The effectiveness of the developed controller is verified by two simulation examples. (C) 2020 The Franklin Institute. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.