Vision-Based Safety-Critical Landing Control of Quadrotors With External Uncertainties and Collision Avoidance

This article addresses the quadrotors’ safety-critical landing control problem with external uncertainties and collision avoidance. A geometrically robust hierarchical control strategy is proposed for an underactuated quadrotor, which consists of a slow outer loop controlling the position and a fast inner loop regulating the attitude. First, an estimation error quantified (EEQ) observer is developed to identify and compensate for the target’s linear acceleration and the translational disturbances, whose estimation error has a nonnegative upper bound. Furthermore, an outer-loop controller is designed by embedding the EEQ observer and control barrier functions (CBFs), in which the negative effects of external uncertainties, collision avoidance, and input saturation are thoroughly considered and effectively attenuated. For the inner-loop subsystem, a geometric controller with a robust integral of the sign of the error (RISE) control structure is developed to achieve disturbances rejection and asymptotic attitude tracking. Based on Lyapunov techniques and the theory of cascade systems, it is rigorously proven that the closed-loop system is uniformly ultimately bounded. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is demonstrated through numerical simulations and hardware experiments.