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.

This paper presents the nonlinear adaptive control of a quadrotor endowed with a 2 degrees of freedom (DOF) manipulator. By considering the quadrotor and the robot arm as a combined system, complete modeling of the aerial manipulation system (AMS) has been presented using the Euler-Lagrange method. A hierarchical nonlinear control scheme which consists of outer and inner control loops has been utilized. Model Reference Adaptive Controller (MRAC) is designed for the outer loop where the required command signals are generated to force the quadrotor to move on a reference trajectory in the presence of uncertainties and reaction forces coming from the manipulator. For the inner loop, the attitude dynamics of the quadrotor and the dynamics of the 2-DOF robotic arm are considered as a fully actuated 5-DOF unified part of the AMS. Nonlinear adaptive control has been utilized for the low-level controller where the changes in inertias and the masses have been tackled along with the reaction forces acting on the attitude part of the AMS. The proposed technique has been validated through simulations in two different scenarios.

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Quadrotor is a rotary-wing UAV, which has a simple structure but highly nonlinear dynamics. Controlling a hovering quadrotor subject to external disturbances is a crucial task in many applications. In this paper, periodic disturbances have been tackled and novel disturbance observers (DOB) have been developed to estimate the total disturbance acting on the vehicle. It is especially difficult to reject periodic disturbances in low as well as in high frequency region due to the bandwidth limitations of the low-pass filter utilized in conventional DOB. As the cutoff frequency of the low-pass filter is critical, increased bandwidth reduces the robustness which degrades the disturbance rejection performance in the presence of noise. In addition to the lowpass filter, the new structure also consists of a bank of band-pass filters and a high-pass filter. Since the total disturbance acting on the vehicle is compensated by the proposed DOB, PD controllers with feedforward terms are utilized for stabilizing both position and attitude dynamics. Simulation results show the improved robustness obtained by the proposed method.

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