System Characterization and Adaptive Tracking Control of Quadrotors under Multiple Operating Conditions

This paper presents an adaptive controller design framework with input compensation for quadrotor systems, which deals with different system operating conditions with a uniform update law for the controller parameters. The motivation of the work is to handle the situation that existing adaptive control schemes are either restricted to the system equilibrium as the hover condition or unable to deal with the diverse system uncertainties which cause system interactor matrix and high-frequency gain matrix to change. An adaptive control scheme equipped with an input compensator is constructed to make the system to have a uniform interactor matrix and a consistent pattern of the gain matrix signs over different operating conditions, which are key prior design conditions for model reference adaptive control applied to quadrotor systems. To deal with the uncertain system high-frequency gain matrix, a gain matrix decomposition technique is employed to parametrize an error system model in terms of the gain parameters and tracking errors, for the design of an adaptive parameter update law with reduced system knowledge. It is ensured that all closed-loop system signals are bounded, and the system output tracks a reference output asymptotically despite the system parameter uncertainties and the uncertain offsets at non-equilibrium operating conditions. The proposed scheme expands the capacity of adaptive control for quadrotors to operate at multiple operating conditions in the presence of system uncertainties. Simulation results of a quadrotor with the proposed adaptive control scheme are presented to show the desired system performance.