A New Position Control Strategy for VTOL UAVs using IMU and GPS measurements

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel position control method for VTOL UAVs that directly uses IMU and GPS data without requiring attitude measurement, improving performance during acceleration.

Contribution

It presents a control strategy that bypasses the need for attitude reconstruction by directly integrating IMU and GPS measurements, including accelerometer data for better accuracy.

Findings

Effective in simulation with noise and disturbances

Handles vehicle acceleration without relying on gravity vector

Improves position control robustness

Abstract

We propose a new position control strategy for VTOL-UAVs using IMU and GPS measurements. Since there is no sensor that measures the attitude, our approach does not rely on the knowledge (or reconstruction) of the system orientation as usually done in the existing literature. Instead, IMU and GPS measurements are directly incorporated in the control law. An important feature of the proposed strategy, is that the accelerometer is used to measure the apparent acceleration of the vehicle, as opposed to only measuring the gravity vector, which would otherwise lead to unexpected performance when the vehicle is accelerating (i.e. not in a hover configuration). Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed position control strategy in the presence of noise and disturbances.