Decentralized Approaches to Antiwindup Design With Application to Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper considers the design of structured antiwindup (AW) compensators for open-loop stable plants that themselves have a particular structure: a diagonal dynamic part cascaded with a static invertible part. Two approaches to the design of such compensators are proposed. The first one is a pseudodecentralized AW compensator that is a direct extension of a similar scheme in the literature. The second approach allows the AW compensators to be designed individually for each control channel and, provided that a certain linear program is satisfied, allows the compensators to be implemented in such a way that the nonlinear closed loop is asymptotically stable. The design approaches are applied to a quadrotor UAV, which inspired the work, and results from both simulations and flight tests are reported.