Nonlinear Control of Quadrotor for Point Tracking: Actual Implementation and Experimental Tests

In this paper, a nonlinear control scheme along with its simulation and experimental results for a quadrotor are presented. It is not easy to control the quadrotor because the dynamics of quadrotor, which is obtained via the Euler-Lagrangian approach, has the features of underactuated, strongly coupled terms, uncertainty, and multiinput/multioutput. We propose a new nonlinear controller by using a backstepping-like feedback linearization method to control and stabilize the quadrotor. The designed controller is divided into three subcontrollers which are called attitude controller, altitude controller, and position controller. Stability of the designed controller is verified by the Lyapunov stability theorem. Detailed hardware parameters and experimental setups to implement the proposed nonlinear control algorithms are presented. The validity of proposed control scheme is demonstrated by simulations under different simulation scenarios. Experimental results show that the proposed controller is able to carry out the tasks of taking off, hovering, and positioning.