Attitude and Altitude Nonlinear Control Regulation of a Quadcopter Using Quaternion Representation

Controlling a quadcopter is a challenging task because of the inherent high nonlinearity of a quadcopter system. In this paper, a new quaternion based nonlinear feedback controller for attitude and altitude regulation of a quadcopter is proposed. The dynamic model of the quadcopter is derived using Newton and Euler equations. The proposed controller is established based on a feedback linearization technique to control and regulate the quadcopter. Global asymptotic stability of the designed controller is verified using Lyapunov stability criterion. A comparison of the proposed controller performance and that of the state-of-the-art quadcopter controllers is performed to ensure the effectiveness of the proposed model. The efficiency of the proposed controller is clearly shown when the quadcopter is in or near a corner pose. Simulations are performed to assess the transient and steady state performance. Steady State Error (
$E_{ss}$
) and Max Error (
$E_{M}$
) are used as evaluation metrics of the proposed model performance.