Quadrotor UAV Flight Control Using Backstepping Adaptive Controller

In this paper, a mass observer based on adaptive control theory is developed in this paper to estimate the realtime mass of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in flight. A backstepping adaptive controller (BAC) is designed by combining the mass observer with the backstepping control and used as control algorithm for the control of the quadrotor with slow-varying mass. The hovering simulation experiments are presented in MATLAB / SIMULINK simulation environment. The simulation results indicate that the real-time mass of the quadrotor UAV can be estimated by the BAC with a small average error range of 2% of its own mass. In addition, the quadrotor UAV using BAC can keep hovering in the desired position steadily and the position error is remarkably smaller than that using the backstepping controller solely, which shows that the novel BAC can be applied effectively in controlling quadrotor UAV with mass-varying.