Robust Multiple Model Adaptive Control for Dynamic Positioning of Quadrotor Helicopter System

Abstract

The quadrotor control has been one of the benchmark control problems. It is considered as an under-actuated, multivariable and high nonlinear system due to its dynamics, having strong coupling between translation and angular motion and affected by external disturbances associated with flight environment. Therefore, there is a need to design a robust control that can keep up with sudden changes and find better tracking performance against modeling error and uncertainties. In this work, an adaptive state feedback control method denoted as Classical Multiple Model Adaptive Control (CMMAC) has been implemented. This method embodies in its structure a bank of filters. Kalman filter (KF) has been used where each filter has been designed for a specific value of an equilibrium point and set of controllers, which was provided by the LQ-servo design. Comparisons of the performance of a quadrotor system between control designs for single Kalman filter with CMMAC for the same value of uncertainty in terms of Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) have been presented. CMMAC meets better performance of tracking design for all variations; the performance of the controlled quadrotor has been improved for the linear and angular coordinates 100%, as compared to the performance when using one Kalman filter.

Keywords

• quadrotor
• kalman filter
• classical multiple model adaptive control (cmmac)
• lq-servo control
• tracking performance
• performance indices