Experimental validation of a globally stabilizing feedback controller for a quadrotor aircraft with wind disturbance rejection

This paper addresses the design and experimental evaluation of a globally stabilizing controller to steer a quadrotor vehicle along a predefined path. The proposed solution consists of a nonlinear adaptive state feedback controller for thrust and angular velocity actuation that i) guarantees convergence of the closed-loop path following error to zero in the presence of constant force disturbances and ii) ensures that the actuation does not grow unbounded as a function of the position error. A prototyping and testing architecture, developed to streamline the implementation and the tuning of the controller, is also described. Experimental results, where the quadrotor is subject to external wind disturbances, are presented to demonstrate the performance and robustness of the proposed controller.