Extended State Observer based control for coaxial-rotor UAV

This paper considers the problem of controlling the position and the orientation of a Coaxial-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle -CRUAV- despite unknown aerodynamic efforts. A hierarchical flight controller is designed, allowing the trajectory tracking and the stabilization of the vehicle. The designed controller is build through a hierarchical approach yielding two control loops, an inner one to control the attitude and an outer one to control the translational trajectory of the rotorcraft. An Extended State Observer -ESO- is used to estimate the state and the unknown aerodynamic disturbances. The analysis further extends to the design of a control law that takes the disturbance estimation procedure into account. Numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed control strategy. (C) 2015 ISA. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.