Adaptive Trajectory Planning for a Quad-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

This work proposes an adaptive trajectory planning approach for a single quad-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The objective is to drive the system from an initial position to a final one without hitting actuator constraints while minimizing the total time of the mission. The approach employs differential flatness to represent the control inputs to be applied in function of the desired trajectories and formulates the trajectory planning problem as an optimization problem. An adaptive law is introduced to adapt the parameters of the optimization problem in function of the system uncertainties. This adaptation aims to avoid hitting the actuator constraints when the mismatch between the nominal model and the system is large.