Robust Backstepping Control of a Quadrotor UAV Under Pink Noise and Sinusoidal Disturbance

Abstract

The new innovations in software and sensor technologies have facilitated the production of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and expanded their area of use. Quadrotor UAVs are employed in a wide range of fields such as disaster relief, search and rescue, surveillance, mining, firefighting, crop dusting, product delivery, counterterrorism and photography.In order for the quadrotor to carry out these missions successfully, it must have a robust control structure. In this paper, a robust backstepping controller design that is resistant to pink noise and sinusoidal disturbance is proposed. Background noise in electronic devices is known as pink noise. The design of the background noise-tolerant controller is important as it improves the quadrotor's reference tracking performance. In the framework of this analysis, sinusoidal disturbance and pink noise were applied to the control structure of the selected quadrotor and its reference tracking performance was analysed. With the purpose of highlighting the superior features of the proposed backstepping control technique, the simulations that were carried out also involved the use of a PID controller and of a Lyapunov-based controller, and the results obtained for these controllers were compared with those obtained for the backstepping controller. As such, the time responses (rise time, settling time and overshoot) for the backstepping, PID and Lyapunov-based controllers were analysed. The obtained outcomes proved the superiority of the backstepping control design.