Position control of a small scale quadrotor using block feedback linearization control

Abstract

This paper presents a nonlinear controller based on block control technique combined with feedback linearization to be applied to a quadrotor. A quadrotor is one type of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) which is equipped with four rotors. First, the quadrotor attitude balancing is kept using three PID regulators. After that, position control is achieved using block control technique which transforms a multivariable system into a SISO for the design of feedback linearization. This work deals with controlling the position of body-centered quadrotor in 3D dimensional space where the movements of quadrotor in x, y, z axes are controlled separately by the proposed controllers. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed controller, simulation results are shown. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.