Global exponential stabilization of a quadrotor by hybrid control

The main purpose of this paper is to introduce a hybrid controller for global attitude tracking of a quadrotor. This controller globally exponentially stabilizes the desired attitude, a task that is impossible to accomplish with memoryless discontinuous or continuous state feedback owing to topological obstruction. Thereafter, this paper presents a new centrally synergistic potential function to construct hybrid feedback that defeats the topological obstruction. This function induces a gradient vector field to globally asymptotically stabilize the reference attitude and produces the synergy gap to generate a switching control law. The proposed control structure is consisting of two major parts. In the first part, a synergetic controller is designed to cooperate with the hybrid controller, whereas it exponentially stabilizes the origin of the error dynamics. In the second part, a hybrid controller is introduced to globally stabilize the attitude of the quadrotor, where an average dwell constraint is considered with the switching control law to guarantee the exponential stability of the switched system. Finally, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed control technique are validated by a comparative analysis in simulations.

Automated summary

This paper introduces a hybrid controller for global attitude tracking of a quadrotor, aiming to globally stabilize the desired attitude that is impossible to accomplish with memoryless discontinuous or continuous state feedback due to topological obstruction. A new centrally synergistic potential function is presented to construct hybrid feedback that overcomes the topological obstruction, inducing a gradient vector field to stabilize the reference attitude and generate a switching control law. The proposed control structure consists of a synergistic controller and a hybrid controller, validated through comparative analysis in simulations for effectiveness and superiority.