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Exponentially Stable Motion Control for Multirotor UAVs with Rotor Drag and Disturbance Compensation

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Abstract

In this paper we propose a centralized disturbance observer-based integral-augmented backstepping nonlinear motion control for a multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The approach explicitly compensates for rotor drag forces. The control is termed centralized as it based on the full rigid body vehicle model (i.e., rotational and translational dynamics). The dynamic state feedback includes two disturbance observers which estimate external force and torque disturbances. The effect of rotor drag is compensated in the proposed force disturbance observer and the backstepping motion controller. The closed-loop dynamics is proven to be exponentially stable in the presence of constant disturbances. The proposed control is implemented on the open-source PX4 autopilot software and validated using a Software-in-the-loop (SITL) simulation. The simulation results demonstrate the method’s robustness and steady-state error performance. Rotor drag compensation is shown to improve the tracking error performance.

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Code Availability

The code is available at https://github.com/ANCL/UAV_DOBIBS_V2

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Funding

The support provided by the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, Government of Alberta, Major Innovation Fund project RCP-19-001-MIF, Autonomous Systems Initiative, is gratefully acknowledged to assist with the preparation of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, T6G 1H9, Edmonton, Canada

    Amir Moeini, Alan F. Lynch & Qing Zhao

Authors
  1. Amir Moeini
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  2. Alan F. Lynch
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  3. Qing Zhao
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study, conception, and design. Coding, controller simulation, and data collection were performed by Amir Moeini. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Amir Moeini and all authors have assisted in editing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alan F. Lynch.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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A preliminary version of the submitted paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS’20), Athens, Greece.

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Moeini, A., Lynch, A.F. & Zhao, Q. Exponentially Stable Motion Control for Multirotor UAVs with Rotor Drag and Disturbance Compensation. J Intell Robot Syst 103, 15 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01452-9

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