Passivity-based simple adaptive control for quadrotor helicopter in the presence of actuator dynamics

In this paper, a passivity-based simple adaptive control strategy is proposed for the attitude and altitude control of Quadrotor Helicopter in the presence of actuator dynamics. The proposed adaptive control requires the system to be Almost Strictly Passive (ASP) or Almost Strictly Positive Real (ASPR) in linear time-invariant (LTI) systems so that the closed-loop stability can be guaranteed. Unfortunately, most of systems in the real world including Quadrotors do not satisfy the ASP/ASPR conditions and especially in the presence of actuator dynamics. To this effect, the so-called Parallel Feedforward Compensator (PFC) is introduced to achieve the required conditions. Stability of the closed-loop adaptive system is established. The efficiency and high performance of the proposed adaptive controller are verified through simulation for the Quadrotor Helicopter.