Quaternion-based nonlinear trajectory tracking control of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle

At present, most controllers of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs) use Euler angles to express attitude. These controllers suffer a singularity problem when the pitch angle is near 90°, which limits the maneuverability of the UAV. To overcome this problem, based on the quaternion attitude representation, a 6 degree of freedom(DOF) nonlinear controller of a quadrotor UAV is designed using the trajectory linearization control(TLC) method. The overall controller contains a position sub-controller and an attitude sub-controller. The two controllers regulate the translational and rotational motion of the UAV, respectively. The controller is improved by using the commanded value instead of the nominal value as the input of the inner control loop. The performance of controller is tested by simulation before and after the improvement, the results show that the improved controller is better. The proposed controller is also tested via numerical simulation and real flights and is compared with the traditional controller based on Euler angles. The test results confirm the feasibility and the robustness of the proposed nonlinear controller. The proposed controller can successfully solve the singularity problem that usually occurs in the current attitude control of UAV and it is easy to be realized.