Tracking Control of a Quadrotor with Input Saturation and External Disturbances

This paper presents a model reference attitude tracking controller design for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle subject to saturated actuators and external disturbances. The dynamical nonlinear model of the quadrotor's attitude is represented by an uncertain-like Takagi-Sugeno model, with exact matching on a compact subset of the state space. The generalized sector condition is employed to deal with the saturated inputs of the quadrotor. LMI conditions are derived for the design of the proposed tracking controller from a quadratic Lyapunov function, together with a performance index used to minimize the L-2-norm transfer between the disturbances and the state tracking errors. Because of the input saturation and the validity domain of the Takagi-Sugeno model, the obtained results only hold regionally and an optimization procedure to estimate the closed-loop tracking domain of attraction is proposed. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design methodology. Copyright (c) 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)