Time Domain Disturbance Observer Based Control of a Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

This paper presents a time domain disturbance observer based controller applied to a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle. The quadrotor stabilization performance, in its hovering configuration, in the presence of wind disturbances is studied using simulations. The wind disturbances are simulated using the Dryden wind model. The disturbance observer based controller is compared to a state space integral controller. The integral controller is designed based on a pole placement approach using a Lyapunov-based methodology. Simulation results have shown that the disturbance observer based controller is found to offer superior stabilization performance. In addition, it offers the advantage of simplified gains tuning due to the separation property.