Optimal Control of a Quadcopter: A Constrained Optimization Problem

In recent era, the quadcopters have become popular particularly due to their extension as unmanned aerial vehicles and remotely piloted aerial systems. The critical nature of its flight control is one of the main concerns for its advanced operations. These advanced operations involve on-board stabilization, trajectory tracking, unpredictable changes in the environment, and resilience to noisy data from small sensor systems. In this work, the quadcopter has been considered as a constrained problem, where optimization is required during transition between different set-points of advanced flight control, operations in action and reaction pairs. Firstly, dynamics of quadcopter along with its translational motion have been derived. Secondly, constrained optimization cost function has been set, which is the main building block for deriving the augmented Lagrangian optimization. Thirdly, co-states of the derived constraints are determined to maintain convergence. Performance evaluation showed accuracy of the proposed scheme.