Active Disturbance Rejection Control of an Urban Air Mobility Vehicle: A Computational Investigation

Advanced and Urban Air Mobility are rapidly expanding new areas of development of the aviation sector. Operations involving small aerial vehicles operating in the urban environment have already been conducted. These type of operations are expected to encounter turbulent winds due to urban structures that could affect their performance and limit safe operation. This paper presents the development of a simulation to predict the flight performance of a quadrotor operating in representative urban airflow conditions while using PID and Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) flight controllers. The performances of the two controllers are compared for different cases with one out-performing the other depending on the case. It was found that when ADRC is applied without appropriate tuning methodologies it will not outperform PID. However, for one case involving altitude control at a stationary point, ADRC did outperform PID. This is likely due to better chosen ADRC gain values and points to the potential suitability of ADRC for control in turbulent wind conditions. This work lays the groundwork for future investigations to assess controller performance in urban airflows and provides insight on which conditions are more and less challenging for different controller types.