Neural PD Controller for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Trained with Extended Kalman Filter

Flying robots have gained great interest because of their numerous applications. For this reason, the control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is one of the most important challenges in mobile robotics. These kinds of robots are commonly controlled with Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers; however, traditional linear controllers have limitations when controlling highly nonlinear and uncertain systems such as UAVs. In this paper, a control scheme for the pose of a quadrotor is presented. The scheme presented has the behavior of a PD controller and it is based on a Multilayer Perceptron trained with an Extended Kalman Filter. The Neural Network is trained online in order to ensure adaptation to changes in the presence of dynamics and uncertainties. The control scheme is tested in real time experiments in order to show its effectiveness.