Tracking Flight Control of Quadrotor Based on Disturbance Observer

Abstract

In this paper, a tracking flight control scheme is proposed based on a disturbance observer for a quadrotor with external disturbances. To facilitate the processing of external time-varying disturbances, it is assumed to consist of some harmonic disturbances. Then, a disturbance observer is proposed to estimate the unknown disturbance. By using the output of the disturbance observer, a flight controller of the quadrotor is developed to track the given signals which are generated by the reference model. Finally, the proposed control method is applied to flight control of the quadrotor Quanser Qball 2. The experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed control strategy.