Attitude and Altitude Nonlinear Control Regulation of a Quadcopter Using Quaternion Representation

Abstract

Controlling a quadcopter is a challenging task because of the inherent high nonlinearity of a quadcopter system. In this paper, a new quaternion based nonlinear feedback controller for attitude and altitude regulation of a quadcopter is proposed. The dynamic model of the quadcopter is derived using Newton and Euler equations. The proposed controller is established based on a feedback linearization technique to control and regulate the quadcopter. Global asymptotic stability of the designed controller is verified using Lyapunov stability criterion. A comparison of the proposed controller performance and that of the state-of-the-art quadcopter controllers is performed to ensure the effectiveness of the proposed model. The efficiency of the proposed controller is clearly shown when the quadcopter is in or near a corner pose. Simulations are performed to assess the transient and steady state performance. Steady State Error (Ess) and Max Error (EM) are used as evaluation metrics of the proposed model performance.