On control law partitioning for nonlinear control of a quadrotor UAV

Control law partitioning has widely been used over the years for the control of robotic manipulators. Partitioning scheme is well suited for the control of nonlinear and coupled dynamical systems. Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) owns coupled nonlinear dynamics along with underactuation property. This study uses aforementioned partitioning control scheme to devise a nonlinear flight controller for quadrotor UAV. Model-based part of the control scheme is employed to cancel out the nonlinearities while servo portion is used for tuning the controller gains independently, which is in fact, the major contribution of this brief. Stability of designed controller is guaranteed using Lyapunov theory. Finally, numerical simulation is performed and results are illustrated to verify the effectiveness of designed controller.