Robust Trajectory Tracking Control for Quadrotor UAV with External Disturbances via Fully Actuated System Approach

This paper proposes a robust trajectory tracking control strategy based on the high-order fully actuated system approach and disturbance observer. In spite of the strong coupling characteristic and high nonlinearity of the quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (QUAV) system, the linear time-invariant system with desired eigenstructures can be obtained by designing a greatly simple robust controller via the direct parametric method. Meanwhile, a disturbance observer (DO) is designed to estimate the external disturbances, and the output of the DO can be adapted for the controller design to compensate for the affect of external disturbances on control performance. Eventually, the numerical simulation results of the QUAV trajectory tracking demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed robust control scheme.