A backstepping disturbance observer control for multirotor UAVs: theory and experiment
Amir Moeini, Alan F. Lynch, Qing Zhao
Abstract
This paper presents a backstepping disturbance observer based control (DOBC) for trajectory tracking motion control of multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Two disturbance observers (DO) estimate external force and torque disturbances acting on the UAV. A nonlinear backstepping dynamic state feedback is proposed which uses the DO estimates to achieve exponential stability for the closed-loop tracking error under constant disturbances. The stability analysis accounts for the entire nonlinear vehicle model which includes translational and rotational dynamics. Software-in-the-loop simulation and experimental results are presented showing the effectiveness of the proposed method using the commonly used PX4/Pixhawk development framework.