A survey on fractional order control techniques for unmanned aerial and ground vehicles

In recent years, numerous applications of science and engineering for modeling and control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) systems based on fractional calculus have been realized. The extra fractional order derivative terms allow to optimizing the performance of the systems. The review presented in this paper focuses on the control problems of the UAVs and UGVs that have been addressed by the fractional order techniques over the last decade

Tracking Control of Quadrotors

In this thesis, the tracking control problem of a 6 DOF quadrotor is considered, and different control method is proposed considering optimal control, parametric and nonparametric uncertainty, input saturation, and distributed formation control. An optimal control approach is developed for single quadrotor tracking by minimizing the cost function. For uncertainties of the dynamic system, a robust adaptive tracking controller is proposed with the special structure of the dynamics of the system. Considering the uncertainty and input constraints, a robust adaptive saturation controller is proposed with the aid of an auxiliary compensated system. Decentralized formation control method for quadrotors is presented using a leader-follower scheme using proposed optimal control method. Virtual leader is employed to drive the quadrotors to their desired formation and ultimately track the trajectory defined by the virtual leader. Sliding mode estimators have been implemented to estimate the states of the virtual leader. The control method is designed considering switching communication topologies among the quadrotors. Simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches

Dynamics and Control of a Multi-Rotor Aircraft

Despite the fact that aerodynamic loads (forces and moments) induced by airflow relative to a quadrotor vertical take-off and landing aircraft consist of both deterministic and stochastic components, all existing works on controlling the aircraft either ignore these loads or treat them as deterministic. This simplification deteriorates the control performance in a practical implementation. This thesis presents a constructive design of controllers for a quadrotor aircraft to track a reference path in three-dimensional space under both deterministic and stochastic aerodynamic loads