Attitude Control of a Quadcopter Using Adaptive Control Technique

This chapter presents an adaptive control technique to stabilize the attitude dynamics of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) type quadrotor in the presence of disturbances and/or uncertainties in the parameters due to changes in the payload, nonlinear actuators, and change in environmental conditions. To address the above problem, MRAC (model reference adaptive control) strategy is used. In this schema, a cost function is defined as a function of the error between the output of the system and a desired response from a reference model. Based on this error, the controller parameters are updated. To guarantee the global asymptotic stability of the system, Lyapunov’s theory is applied. Simulation results using MATLAB-Simulink platform are presented to demonstrate the convergence of the controller parameters