Quadrotor UAV flight control via a novel saturation integral backstepping controller

Abstract

In this paper, in order to reduce the influence on quadrotor flight from different external disturbances, a novel nonlinear robust controller is designed and used in the quadrotor system. At first, a nonlinear dynamic model of the quadrotor is formulated mathematically. Then, a quadrotor flight controller is designed with the method of classical backstepping control (CBC) and the nonlinear system using this controller is proved to be asymptotically stabilized by the Lyapunov stability theory when there is no external disturbance. At last, a new nonlinear robust controller established by the introduction of both the saturation function and the integral of error into CBC is designed and named as saturation integral backstepping control (SIBC). The boundedness of the nonlinear system under external disturbances is verified by the uniformly ultimately bounded theorem of the nonvanishing perturbation. The numerical simulations of hovering and trajectory tracking are carried out using MATLAB/SIMULINK taking the external disturbances into consideration. In addition, a series of outdoor flight experiments were completed on the actual experimental equipments of quadrotor UAV under the time-varying disturbance from wind. According to the simulation and flight experiment results, the proposed SIBC strategy shows a superior robustness than CBC and integral backstepping control (IBC) strategy. ARTICLE HISTORY

A review on drones controlled in real-time

“…A UAV is controlled by an embedded computer called the Flight Control System (FCS) or flight controller [ 34 – 36 ], basically consisting of a control software loaded into a microcontroller. The microcontroller reads information from on-board sensors, such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, pressure sensors, GPS, etc.,as well as input from the pilot, perform control calculations, and control the motors on the UAV [ 37 , 38 ].…”

PSO with Robust Disturbance Rejection Controller for Maneuvering Control the Altitude of UAV

“…The dynamics of the quad-rotor aircraft used for the mathematical modelling and the kinematic equation of Euler angles of the UAV taken from [11] and [12];…”

Quadrotor trajectory tracking and obstacle avoidance by chaotic grey wolf optimization- based backstepping control with sliding mode extended state observer

“…Reinforcement learning and model predictive control were combined in Greatwood and Richards (2019) to enable quadrotor to navigate unknown environments, in which Reinforcement learning was used to navigate non-convex obstacle fields and model predictive control was executed in real-time on modest hardware for control. A novel saturation integral backstepping controller was designed to reduce the influence on quadrotors flight from different external disturbances (Zhou et al, 2019), which introduce saturation function and integral of error into classical backstepping control. Based on Lyapunov theory, the global stability of the system is guaranteed.…”