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Trajectory Tracking Control of a Quadrotor Aerial Vehicle in the Presence of Input Constraints

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Abstract

In this paper, we address the control problem of a Quadrotor Aerial Vehicle (QAV) in the presence of the input constraints. For this purpose, a separation principle is applied in the control design. The QAV model is decoupled and constructed as a cascaded structure to handle its underactuated property. By imposing the constraints on the orientation angles, we show that the QAV will be never overturned. Then, a combination of the backstepping method, barrier Lyapunov and saturation functions is used in the control design for each subsystem to deal with both input and output constraints. Our design renders the cascaded system of the QAV into the form in which an Input-to-State Stable (ISS) subsystem is driven by an asymptotic subsystem, and hence the stability of the overall cascaded system of the QAV is ensured. In addition, the tracking errors are guaranteed to converge to the origin. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate University of Science and Technology (GUST), VAST, Hanoi, Vietnam

    Trong-Toan Tran

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Social Robotics Lab, Interactive Digital Media Institute (IDMI), National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117576, Singapore

    Shuzhi Sam

  3. School of Automation and Electrical Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China

    Wei He

  4. Engineering Product Development (EPD) Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Tampines, Singapore

    Pham Luu-Trung-Duong

  5. Institute of Applied Mechanics and Informatics, Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam

    Nguyen-Vu Truong

  6. Institute of Applied Mechanics and Informatics (IAMI), VAST, Hanoi, Vietnam

    Trong-Toan Tran

Authors
  1. Trong-Toan Tran
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  2. Shuzhi Sam
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  3. Wei He
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  4. Pham Luu-Trung-Duong
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  5. Nguyen-Vu Truong
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Trong-Toan Tran.

Additional information

Recommended by Associate Editor Yang Tang under the direction of Editor Hyun-Seok Yang. This research is funded by Graduate University of Science and Technology under grant number GUST.STS.NV2017-CH02.

Trong Toan Tran received his B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees both in automation from Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Moscow, Russia, in 2006 and 2008, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in automatic control from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China, in 2016. His current research interests include Autonomous Control, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Deepwater Technology.

Shuzhi Sam Ge received his B.Sc. degree from the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Beijing, China in 1986, and a Ph.D. degree from Imperial College London, London, U.K., in 1993. He was with the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China. He is the Director with the Social Robotics Laboratory, Interactive Digital Media Institute, Singapore, and the Centre for Robotics, Chengdu, and a Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore. He has co-authored four books and over 300 international journal and conference papers. His current research interests include social robotics, adaptive control, intelligent systems, and artificial intelligence. Dr. Ge is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Social Robotics (Springer). He has served/been serving as an Associate Editor for a number of flagship journals, including the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL NETWORKS, and Automatica. He serves as a Book Editor for the Taylor and Francis Automation and Control Engineering Series. He served as the Vice President for Technical Activities, from 2009 to 2010, the Vice President of Membership Activities, from 2011 to 2012, and a member of the Board of Governors, from 2007 to 2009 at the IEEE Control Systems Society. He is a fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and the Society of Automotive Engineering.

Wei He received the B.Eng. degree in automation from the College of Automation Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China, in 2006, and the Ph.D. degree in automatic control from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore, in 2011. He was a Research Fellow with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NUS, from 2011 to 2012. He is currently a Full Professor with the School of Automation and Electrical Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China. He has co-authored one book published by Springer and published over 100 international journal and conference papers. His current research interests include robotics, distributed parameter systems, and intelligent control systems. Prof. He was a recipient of the Newton Advanced Fellowship from the Royal Society, U.K. He serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS: SYSTEMS, and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKS AND LEARNING SYSTEMS and as an Editor for the Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems and the IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica. He is a Leading Guest Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKS AND LEARNING SYSTEMS special issue on "Intelligent Control Through Neural Learning and Optimization for Human Machine Hybrid Systems." He is a member of the IFAC Technical Committee on Distributed Parameter Systems, IFAC Technical Committee on Computational Intelligence in Control, and the IEEE Control Systems Society Technical Committee on Distributed Parameter Systems.

Pham Luu-Trung-Duong received the B.S., M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Bauman Moscow State Technical University, in 2006 and 2008, and his Ph.D. degree in Process Control from Yeungnam University in 2013. He is a postdoc at Engineering Product Development Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design. His research interests include PID control, stochastic system, and uncertainty quantification.

Nguyen-Vu Truong received the B.Eng. (Hons 1) and Ph.D. degree both in control engineering from RMIT university, Melbourne, Australia. Till 2010, he has been working as an academic staff at RMIT and as a research scientist at the Australian Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre. Since then, he joined the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology as a principal research scientist, then a senior principal research scientist, holding a research chair in control and mechatronics engineering. Starting from 2016, he took up the Director General position at the National Institute of Applied Mechanics and Informatics.

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Tran, TT., Sam, S., He, W. et al. Trajectory Tracking Control of a Quadrotor Aerial Vehicle in the Presence of Input Constraints. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 16, 2966–2976 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-016-0787-y

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