Attitude and Altitude Tracking Controller for Quadcopter Dynamical Systems

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle quadcopters have applications in different real-life areas. They are nonlinear systems that necessitate the utilization of nonlinear control techniques. In this paper, we propose a new quaternion-based tracking controller for an underactuated quadcopter based on the pseudo linear feedback linearization technique. The quadcopter dynamic model was derived using Newton and Euler equations, and the global asymptotic stability of the quadcopter was verified using the Lyapunov stability criterion. The proposed controller has been compared to three state-of-the-art quadcopter controllers. Through simulation results, it has been shown that the proposed model has an effective and better performance than others. The metrics used in this evaluation are the steady-state error, maximum error, overshoot, and settling time. The different metrics proved the good performance of the proposed model in most of the different states that are presented.

Keywords

• Attitude and altitude tracking
• feedback linearization
• nonlinear control
• quaternion tracking control
• underactuated system