Bounded Attitude Control with Active Disturbance Rejection Capabilities for Multirotor UAVs

Abstract

This paper addresses an attitude tracking control design applied to multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) based on an ADRC approach. The proposed technique groups the endogenous and exogenous disturbances into a total disturbance, and then this is estimated online via an extended state observer (ESO). Further, a quaternion-based feedback is developed, which is assisted by a feedforward term obtained via the ESO to relieve the total disturbance actively. The control law is bounded; consequently, it takes into account the maximum capabilities of the actuators to reject the disturbances. The stability is analyzed in the ISS framework, guaranteeing that the closed loop (controller-ESO-UAV) is robustly stable. The simulation results allow validation of the theoretical features.