A nonlinear adaptive control approach for quadrotor UAVs

In this paper, a continuous, time varying adaptive controller is developed for an underactuated quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The vehicle's dynamic model is subject to uncertainties associated with mass, inertia matrix, and aerodynamic damping coefficients. A Lyapunov based approach is utilized to ensure that position and yaw rotation tracking errors are ultimately driven to a neighborhood about zero that can be made arbitrary small. Simulation results are included to illustrate the performance of the control strategy.