Title: Differentially flat trajectory generation and controller design for a quadrotor UAV

Authors: Arindam Singha; Anjan Kumar Ray; Arun Baran Samaddar

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, National Institute of Technology Sikkim, Ravangla, South Sikkim, India ' Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, National Institute of Technology Sikkim, Ravangla, South Sikkim, India ' National Institute of Technology Sikkim, Ravangla, South Sikkim, India

Abstract: A control strategy of differentially flat trajectory generation and a backstepping controller for tracking the desired trajectory are developed for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). A globally smooth trajectory is generated through multiple waypoints, which are at different planes. To show the effectiveness of the trajectory generation method, four different shapes of trajectories are generated using different numbers of waypoints. Simulation studies have shown that the proposed paradigm is able to generate smooth trajectories using multiple waypoints. Along with that the quadrotor UAV has successfully tracked the desired trajectories by using the proposed controller. The proposed controller is also validated with constant and variable desired yaw angles. The robustness of the proposed controller is validated in presence of external disturbances in the system control input. The proposed controller is also compared with other controllers and shows satisfactory performances.

Keywords: Andrews' curve; backstepping controller; differential flatness; path planning; trajectory generation; trajectory tracking; quadrotor UAV.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMIC.2021.119031

International Journal of Modelling, Identification and Control, 2021 Vol.37 No.1, pp.32 - 44

Received: 30 Apr 2020
Accepted: 23 Nov 2020
Published online: 18 Nov 2021 *

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