A Novel Dual Quaternion Based Dynamic Motion Primitives for Acrobatic Flight

The realization of motion description is a challenging work for fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) acrobatic flight, due to the inherent coupling problem in translational-rotational motion. This paper aims to develop a novel maneuver description method through the idea of imitation learning, and there are two main contributions of our work: 1) A dual quaternion based dynamic motion primitives (DQ-DMP) is proposed and the state equations of the position and attitude can be combined without loss of accuracy. 2) An online hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) training system is established. Based on the DQ-DMP method, the geometric features of the demonstrated maneuver can be obtained in real-time, and the stability of the DQ-DMP is theoretically proved. The simulation results illustrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to the traditional position/attitude decoupling method.