Robust backstepping control for highly demanding quadrotor flight

Abstract

This paper presents a control strategy that uses smoothly-bounded error corrections together with force-compensating terms to overcome perturbation problems that appear in quadrotor autonomous navigation, particularly in highly demanding flight conditions and slowly-varying wind conditions. First, the quadrotor dynamic model is reduced using feedback linearization. Then an integral-backstepping-like controller is designed, where bounded error-correction actions are introduced using smooth functions. Numerical simulations and real-time experiments are carried out to evaluate the proposed control strategy, showing an adequate behavior under high-acceleration trajectory tracking and slowly-varying wind conditions.