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Abstract This paper presents a geometric adaptive position tracking control system for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle. In particular, the attitude control system is designed on the product of the two-dimensional unit sphere and the one-dimensional circle such that the direction of the thrust that is critical for position tracking is controlled independently from the yawing direction that is irrelevant to the position dynamics. Compared against the prior work with coupled attitude controls on the special orthogonal group, the proposed controller prevents large yaw errors from causing an undesirable performance degradation in tracking a position command. Further, the control input is augmented with adaptive control terms to mitigate the effects of disturbances, and it is formulated globally on the spheres to avoid singularities and complexities of local coordinates. The efficacy of the proposed control system is illustrated by both numerical examples and indoor/outdoor flight experiments.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
A High-Gain Observer Approach to Robust Trajectory Estimation and Tracking for a Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
Abstract Using the context of trajectory estimation and tracking for multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), we explore the challenges in applying high-gain observers to highly dynamic systems. The multirotor will operate in the presence of external disturbances and modeling errors. At the same time, the reference trajectory is unknown and generated from a reference system with unknown or partially known dynamics. We assume the only measurements that are available are the position and orientation of the multirotor and the position of the reference system. We adopt an extended high-gain observer (EHGO) estimation framework to estimate the unmeasured multirotor states, modeling errors, external disturbances, and the reference trajectory. We design a robust output feedback controller for trajectory tracking that comprises a feedback linearizing controller and the EHGO. The proposed control method is rigorously analyzed to establish its stability properties. Finally, we illustrate our theoretical results through numerical simulation and experimental validation in which a multirotor tracks a moving ground vehicle with an unknown trajectory and dynamics and successfully lands on the vehicle while in motion.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734272
- PAR ID:
- 10538985
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASME
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control
- Volume:
- 147
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0022-0434
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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