Lyapunov based trajectory tracking controller for a quadrotor UAV with nonholonomic constraints

Abstract

This paper presents a Lyapunov based controller for a quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to address the desired trajectory tracking problem. The controller is designed based on the dynamical model of the quadrotor UAV. The quadrotor UAV system can be divided into two subsystems e.g. translational components as the positional subsystem and rotational components as the attitude subsystem. The positional subsystem is an under-actuated system, and the attitude subsystem is a fully actuated system. The desired roll and pitch angles are calculated by considering the nonholonomic constraints of a quadrotor UAV. The desired yaw is considered as constant as well as variable considering different applications. The proposed controller is applied to hover at a desired setpoint, movement through multiple desired waypoints at different planes, and to track desired trajectories on different planes and with different shapes. The results depict that the quadrotor UAV has successfully tracked the desired waypoints and trajectories and hover at a desired setpoint. The comparative results are provided on multiple aspects such as the control input values, improvement of the tracking performance. These shows the effectiveness of the proposed controller over existing controllers.

Keywords

• Lyapunov Theory
• Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
• Trajectory Tracking
• Waypoint Tracking
• Setpoint Hovering
• Non-holonomic Constraints