Geometric Adaptive Control on SE(3) for Fully-Actuated Aerial Vehicles with Online Parameter Estimation

This paper presents a geometric adaptive control framework to control fully actuated aerial vehicles that are subjected to variations in mass, CoG and moment of inertia due to unknown payload events. The controller is formulated on SE(3) and uses Lie-algebra errors in se(3) to achieve global, coordinate-free pose tracking. An adaptation law is derived for online estimation of the generalized inertia parameters with Lyapunov stability guarantees. The approach is validated in MATLAB simulations over multiple trajectories with an unknown initial payload and an abrupt payload drop. Results demonstrate consistently high SE(3) tracking performance, rapid recovery after parameter changes, and substantial improvement over a non-adaptive baseline. Mass estimation is reliable, CoG estimation achieves partial convergence and improves with higher CoG adaptation gains, while inertia parameters show poor convergence due to insufficient regressor excitation, although this does not cause any system instability.