Adaptive Tracking Control for a Quad-rotor

This paper illustrates the application of an adaptive flight control architecture to a scale quad-rotor. For autonomous VTOL (Vertical Takeoff and Landing) flight, it is common to separate the control problem into an inner fast loop that controls attitude and an outer slow loop that controls the trajectory of the VTOL. In this paper we augment a conventional PD controller conceived mainly for hovering, with an adaptive element using a real-time tuning single hidden layer neural network in a inner-outer loop combined architecture to account for model inversion error cancellation, issued in the feedback linearization process. The results shown in simulations reveal the superior performance of the augmented controller in tracking maneuvers.