Advanced Control Strategies for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The design and control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is an active research area given the popularity and complexity of these machines. This research focuses on the design of control algorithms to control the motion and trajectory-following performance of a quadrotor. Quadrotors are operated in environments with varying conditions and parametric uncertainties, such as sudden/gradual mass fluctuation when transporting / discharging objects, aerodynamic changes (wind gusts), variation in the center of mass position, to name a few. The aim of this research is to tackle the problem of parametric uncertainty and unmodeled nonlinearities via the design of adaptive control laws, which are validated in simulation on a high-fidelity nonlinear dynamic model, and experimentally on an available quadrotor platform.
By: Mohammad Jawad Lakis