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An Adaptive Dynamic Controller for Quadrotor to Perform Trajectory Tracking Tasks

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Abstract

This work proposes an adaptive dynamic controller to guide an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) when accomplishing trajectory tracking tasks. The controller structure consists of a kinematic controller that generates reference commands to a dynamic compensator in charge of changing the reference commands according to the system dynamics. The final control actions thus generated are then sent to the UAV to make it to track an arbitrary trajectory in the 3D space. The parameters of the dynamic compensator are directly updated during navigation, configuring a directly updated self-tuning regulator with input error, aiming at reducing the tracking errors, thus improving the system performance in task accomplishment. After describing the control system thus designed, its stability is proved using the Lyapunov theory. To validate the proposed system simulations and real experiments were run, some of them are reported here, whose results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control system and its good performance, even when the initial values of the parameters associated to the dynamic model of the UAV are completely unknown. One of the conclusions, regarding the results obtained, is that the proposed system can be used as if it were an on-line identification subsystem, since the parameters converge to values that effectively represent the UAV dynamics.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank CNPq – Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, an agency of the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology to support scientific and technological development –, FAPES – Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa e Inovação do Espírito Santo, the agency of the State of Espírito Santo that supports scientific and technological development –, for the financial support to this work. They also thank CAPES – Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, an agency of the Brazilian Ministry of Education to support high education –, for the scholarship granted to Mr. Santos, the Federal Institute of Espírito Santo, the Federal University of Espírito Santo and the Institute of Automatics of the National University of San Juan, Argentine, and CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas), Argentina for supporting the development of this research. A short version of this paper was presented in ICUAS 2017.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Federal Institute of Espírito Santo, Rodovia ES-080, Km 93, São João de Petrópolis, Santa Teresa, ES, 29660-000, Brazil

    Milton Cesar Paes Santos

  2. Institute of Automatics, National University of San Juan and CONICET, Av. Libertador San Martin, 1112 (O), San Juan, Argentina

    Claudio Darío Rosales, Jorge Antonio Sarapura & Ricardo Carelli

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering, Federal University of Espírito Santo, Av. Fernando Ferrari, 514, Goiabeiras, Vitória, ES, Brazil

    Mário Sarcinelli-Filho

Authors
  1. Milton Cesar Paes Santos
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  2. Claudio Darío Rosales
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  3. Jorge Antonio Sarapura
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  4. Mário Sarcinelli-Filho
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  5. Ricardo Carelli
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Correspondence to Milton Cesar Paes Santos.

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Santos, M.C.P., Rosales, C.D., Sarapura, J.A. et al. An Adaptive Dynamic Controller for Quadrotor to Perform Trajectory Tracking Tasks. J Intell Robot Syst 93, 5–16 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-018-0799-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-018-0799-3

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