Robust Optimal Adaptive Trajectory Tracking Control of Quadrotor Helicopter 1

This paper focuses on robust optimal adaptive control strategy to deal with tracking problem of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in presence of parametric uncertainties, actuator amplitude constraints, and unknown time-varying external disturbances. First, Lyapunov-based indirect adaptive controller optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO) is developed for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) nonlinear quadrotor to prevent input constraints violation, and then disturbance observer-based control (DOBC) technique is aggregated with the control system to attenuate the effects of disturbance generated by an exogenous system. The performance of synthesis control method is evaluated by a new performance index function in time-domain, and the stability analysis is carried out using Lyapunov theory. Finally, illustrative numerical simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented approach in altitude and attitude tracking under several conditions, including large time-varying uncertainty, exogenous disturbance, and control input constraints.