Active Disturbance Rejection Control for Attitude Stabilization of Multi-rotors UAVs with bounded inputs

Abstract : This paper proposes a new control schema for precise attitude stabilization of Multi-rotors UAVs subject to unknown external disturbances. Actually, the small size and low inertia moments render the control problem very challenging. Thus, an observer-based and a quaternion-based control schema are proposed. Firstly, and under the assumption that disturbance is smooth and bounded, an extended state observer (ESO) is designed. Once the external disturbance is estimated, a quaternion-based controller is proposed which actively compensates and mitigates the disturbance. The proposed control strategy in this paper is simple to implement and tune. In other words, it tends to be computationally light, which allows to be easily deployed across various hardware-software platforms. Simulations results demonstrate that an improved stabilization performance is achieved when compared to a standard quaternion stabilization control.