Modeling and Control Design of Quadrotor UAVs Using Symbolic Regression

This paper presents a mathematic dynamic model of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (QUAV) by using the symbolic regression (SR) approach and then proposes a hierarchical control scheme for trajectory tracking. In the dynamic modeling, the uncertain partial physical parameters and unknown model structure are both taken into account. Therefore, SR is adopted to construct the dynamic model described by analytic equations, which relieves the burden of modeling. To facilitate position tracking control of a QUAV, the design of controller can be decomposed into two parts: a proportional-integral controller for the position subsystem is first designed to obtain the desired horizontal position and the backstepping method for the attitude subsystem is developed to ensure that the Euler angles and the altitude can fast converge to the reference values. Further simulation results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of SR for modeling.