Autonomous Control of a Quadrotor-Manipulator; Application of Extended State Disturbance Observer

Abstract: In this work, the autonomous control of a quadrotor-manipulator unmanned aerial vehicle is treated using an extended dynamic model. Due to persistent aerodynamic disturbances and dynamic couplings, the control of a quadrotor-manipulator unit is cumbersome. Active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is proposed for the cancellation of the undesirable dynamics while a PD controller is developed for set-point tracking. Parameters were tuned using Gradient Descent-Sequential Quadratic Programming in Simulink design optimization