Differential Flatness of Quadrotor Dynamics Subject to Rotor Drag for Accurate Tracking of High-Speed Trajectories
This addresses the problem of accurate high-speed trajectory tracking for quadrotors, offering a specific improvement over existing control methods.
The paper proves that a quadrotor model with linear rotor drag is differentially flat, enabling direct computation of feed-forward controls from trajectories, which significantly reduces tracking errors compared to methods treating drag as unknown disturbances.
In this paper, we prove that the dynamical model of a quadrotor subject to linear rotor drag effects is differentially flat in its position and heading. We use this property to compute feed-forward control terms directly from a reference trajectory to be tracked. The obtained feed-forward terms are then used in a cascaded, nonlinear feedback control law that enables accurate agile flight with quadrotors. Compared to state-of-the-art control methods, which treat the rotor drag as an unknown disturbance, our method reduces the trajectory tracking error significantly. Finally, we present a method based on a gradient-free optimization to identify the rotor drag coefficients, which are required to compute the feed-forward control terms. The new theoretical results are thoroughly validated trough extensive comparative experiments.