Adaptive Artificial Time Delay Control for Quadrotors under State-dependent Unknown Dynamics

Quadrotors are becoming more and more essential for applications such as payload delivery, inspection and search-and-rescue. Such operations pose considerable control challenges, especially when various (a priori unbounded) state-dependent unknown dynamics arises from payload variations, aerodynamic effects and from reaction forces while operating close to the ground or in a confined space. However, existing adaptive control strategies for quadrotors cannot handle unknown state-dependent uncertainties. We address such unsolved control challenge in this work via a novel adaptive method for artificial time delay control,where unknown dynamics is robustly compensated by using input and state measurements collected at immediate past time instant (i.e., artificially delayed). Closed-loop stability is established via Lyapunov theory. The effectiveness of this controller is validated using experimental results.