Quadcopter Tracking Using Euler-Angle-Free Flatness-Based Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flatness-based control method for quadcopters that avoids Euler angles, reducing computational complexity and improving tracking of aggressive trajectories, validated through Gazebo simulations.

Contribution

It develops a novel Euler-angle-free flatness-based control for quadcopters, enhancing trajectory tracking efficiency and robustness over traditional Euler angle-based methods.

Findings

The proposed control outperforms the Mellinger controller in simulations.

Eliminating Euler angles simplifies computations and improves tracking of aggressive maneuvers.

The method is validated in Gazebo simulation environment.

Abstract

Quadcopter trajectory tracking control has been extensively investigated and implemented in the past. Available controls mostly use the Euler angle standards to describe the quadcopters rotational kinematics and dynamics. As a result, the same rotation can be translated into different roll, pitch, and yaw angles because there are multiple Euler angle standards for characterization of rotation in a 3-dimensional motion space. Additionally, it is computationally expensive to convert a quadcopters orientation to the associated roll, pitch, and yaw angles, which may make it difficult to track quick and aggressive trajectories. To address these issues, this paper will develop a flatness-based trajectory tracking control without using Euler angles. We assess and test the proposed controls performance in the Gazebo simulation environment and contrast its functionality with the existing Mellinger controller, which has been widely adopted by the robotics and unmanned aerial system (UAS) communities.