Tracking Control of Quadrotor With Intermittent Target Measurements: A Stochastic Switched Systems Approach

This article is devoted to the investigation of target tracking control of quadrotor with intermittent measurements, i.e., the measurements of target position are not continuously available. A stochastic switched systems approach is utilized to formulate such a tracking process of quadrotor by splitting it into two modes according to whether the measurements are available. The mode switching of the underlying system is subject to a Markov process to account for the inherent nonmemory randomness of the dwell time of each mode, in contrast with the existing studies that impractically require the duration of the measurements to be greater than a given constant. The stability criteria for the underlying system are derived, upon which a switched controller is designed for the quadrotor position control, rather than the determination of the bounds of the dwell time for given predesigned controllers in each mode. Simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed theoretical results and the superiority of the designed switched controller for tracking control of quadrotor with intermittent target measurements.