Adaptive Control of Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle With Time-Varying Uncertainties

This paper studies the real-time parameter estimation and adaptive tracking control problem for a six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as an under-actuated system. A virtual proportional derivative (PD) is proposed to maintain position dynamics. Two adaptive control schemes are designed and compared to maintain the attitude dynamics of UAV while several parameters of UAV are unknown. In the first scheme, a classical adaptive scheme using the certainty equivalence principle is extended and designed for tracing control of the systems with unknown time-varying parameters. To improve the performance of the first scheme, a new control scheme is designed in the second scheme by proposing additional continuous function to handle the unknown parameters. An additional robust term is designed in both schemes to handle the perturbation caused by unknown time-varying parameters. The rigorous analytical proof and numerical simulation analysis are provided to support the efficacy of the proposed controller.