Tracking Control for a Fully-Actuated UAV

Abstract

The realization of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with three tiltable propellers in a planar 120° arrangement is described in detail. A single rigid body approximate model of this vehicle is fully actuated, thus allowing for a variety of flight maneuvers including translation without tilting and inclined hovering. The tracking control of this inherently unstable system is treated in existing literature but assumes full-state measurement and direct access to the body-fixed forces and torques. To meet these challenges, a fast control scheme for the underlying actuator dynamics is proposed and a state and disturbance estimator based on on-board inertial and infrequent delayed external position and orientation measurements is discussed. All designs are experimentally validated including flight tests that demonstrate good trajectory tracking performance.