Trajectory Tracking of Quadrotor with Bounded Thrust using Model Predictive Control

Abstract

Last decade has seen a growing interest of robotics and control community towards understanding the dynamics and synthesis of control law for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Many control theoretic challenges are captured by UAV systems due to their inherent nonlinear dynamics and the underactuation characteristics. Quadrotor or quadcopter systems belongs to such UAV category having vertical take off and landing (VTOL) capabilities, which makes them ideally suitable for defense and surveillance applications. In this paper, we present a model predictive control (MPC) strategy for stabilization and trajectory tracking of a quadrotor UAV having bounded thrust. The major advantage of MPC over other control schemes is its constraint handling capacity. This feature makes it suitable for dealing with systems having realistic state and input thrust constraints. We illustrate the effectiveness of MPC technique to track a given trajectory while respecting the bound on control input of a quadrotor UAV.