Altitude and attitude active disturbance rejection controller design of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle

This paper presents a new active disturbance rejection controller to solve the altitude and attitude control problem for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle. The proposed method requires only the output information of the system. Using the pitch subsystem as an example, the proposed controller is designed by using dynamic surface control strategy incorporated with tracking differentiator, and extended state observer, which is used to estimate the uncertain disturbance. The estimate states of extended state observer are used to design the dynamic surface control law for altitude and attitude tracking problem of the quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle. The stability analysis proves that a sufficient condition of the asymptotic stability of the extended state observer is achieved, the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system can be guaranteed, and the tracking feedback error can made arbitrarily small by adjusting the controller parameters. Several simulation results are presented to corroborate that the proposed control method has better effectiveness and robustness.