On executing aggressive quadrotor attitude tracking maneuvers under actuator constraints

The quadrotor task of negotiating aggressive attitude maneuvers while adhering to motor constraints is addressed here. The majority of high level quadrotor Nonlinear Control System (NCS) solutions ignore motor control authority limitations, especially important during aggressive attitude maneuvers, generating unrealizable thrusts and negating the validity of the accompanying stability proofs. Here, an attitude control framework is developed, comprised by a thrust allocation strategy and a specially designed geometric attitude tracking controller, allowing the quadrotor to achieve aggressive attitude maneuvers, while complying to actuator constraints and simultaneously staying "close" to a desired position command in a computationally inexpensive way. This is a novel contribution resulting in thrusts realizable by available quadrotors during aggressive attitude maneuvers, and enhanced performance guaranteed by valid stability proofs. Also, it is shown that the developed controller can be combined with a collective thrust expression in producing a position/yaw tracking controller. Through rigorous stability proofs, both the position and attitude frameworks are shown to have desirable closed loop properties that are almost global. This establishes a quadrotor control solution allowing the vehicle to negotiate aggressive maneuvers position/attitude on SE(3). Simulations illustrate and validate the effectiveness and capabilities of the developed solution.