High accuracy robust attitude tracking control application on quadrotor UAV with the prescribed performance

Abstract

In this paper, a high accuracy attitude tracking control is presented for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) under the model uncertainties and external unpredictable disturbances by using a robust feedback control method. First, the cascade attitude dynamics of a quadrotor UAV is derived with the lumped disturbances. Then, a backstepping adaptive modified robust integral of the sign of the error (RISE) control is designed to improve the robustness of the control system against the disturbances. For arriving high accuracy tracking under the disturbances, a prescribed performance control algorithm is employed in combination to hold the transient state performance where the convergence rate is faster than the prescribed value, and the maximum overshoot is less than the prescribed value. The stability analysis is carried out to prove that the presented controller could guarantee that the closed-loop system is asymptotically stable, and the tracking feedback errors can converge to an arbitrarily small value near zero. The superior performance of the proposed control method is illustrated in simulations against the nonlinear lumped disturbances, and the benefits of the proposed robust controller is corroborated by comparing with the existed controller.