Zaki, Hammad (Sabanci University), Unel, Mustafa (Sabanci University), Yildiz, Yildiray (Bilkent University)

Trajectory Control of a Quadrotor Using a Control Allocation Approach

Scheduled for presentation during the "Control Architecture - III" (WeC3), Wednesday, June 14, 2017, 17:00−17:20, Salon CD

2017 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, June 13-16, 2017, Miami Marriott Biscayne Bay, Miami, FL,

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on April 25, 2024

Abstract

A quadrotor is an underactuated unmanned aerial vehicle with four inputs to control the dynamics. Trajectory control of a quadrotor is a challenging task and usually tackled in a hierarchical framework where desired/reference attitude angles are analytically determined from the desired command signals, i.e. virtual controls, that control the positional dynamics of the quadrotor and the desired yaw angle is set to some constant value. Although this method is relatively straightforward, it may produce large and nonsmooth reference angles which must be saturated and low-pass filtered. In this work, we show that the determination of desired attitude angles from virtual controls can be viewed as a control allocation problem and it can be solved numerically using nonlinear optimization where certain magnitude and rate constraints can be imposed on the desired attitude angles and the yaw angle need not be constant. Simulation results for both analytical and numerical methods have been presented and compared. Results for constrained optimization show that the flight performance is quite satisfactory.