Repetitive control design and implementation for periodic motion tracking in aerial robots

This paper describes the design and implementation of a repetitive controller (RC) for tracking periodic trajectories in aerial robots, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The RC is ideally suited for situations where the robot is required to execute a defined flight pattern, over and over again in a periodic fashion. Applications include precision agriculture, and search and rescue, where the desired trajectory is often periodic in time and known a priori. Compared to iterative learning control (ILC), RC is a feedback-based approach which can be plugged into an existing feedback control loop to improve the tracking of period trajectories. Herein, a plug-in type RC is applied to a micro aerial robot, and a systematic approach is presented for designing the control system. The plug-in nature of the design also allows users to enable/disable the controller on the fly. The proposed RC is also compared to existing approaches, including no-reset ILC, which have recently been applied to control aerial robots. The effectiveness of the RC is demonstrated on a custom-designed experimental micro aerial robot. Tracking of circle, square, and figure-eight trajectories are shown in both simulations and experiments. In these cases, the RC reduces the average tracking error by over 58% compared to a well-tuned PID controller, and simulations that compare to no-reset ILC show that the performance of RC is less sensitive to changes in the reference trajectory.