Adaptive closed-loop identification and tracking control of an aerial vehicle with unknown inertia parameters

In this paper, the problem of adaptive closed-loop parameter estimation and tracking control of a six degree of freedom (6-DOF) nonlinear quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is studied. To manage the complexity of the problem, the system dynamics is decomposed into two subsystems,i.e. translational dynamics and rotational dynamics. A nested control architecture is adopted to develop both adaptive tracking control and parameter estimation. To stabilize the outer loop, a virtual control input is proposed using a proportional–derivative (PD) controller to track the x, y and z positions. The rotational dynamics of UAV contains unknown inertia parameters appearing in the control structure as well as in a nonlinear dynamic term. An adaptive tracking scheme is designed using the certainty equivalence principle to handle both parameter estimation and tracking control in a closed-loop. The idea behind the controller design is to cancel the nonlinear term in the inner loop by estimating the unknown system parameters. The stability of the whole closed-loop system is proved with a rigorous analytical study. Moreover, the performance of the proposed controller is verified with several numerical analyses.