Nonlinear Controller Design for a Quadrotor with Inverted Pendulum
This addresses stabilization and tracking challenges for aerial robotics with payloads, but appears incremental as it applies known control methods to a specific configuration.
The paper tackles the problem of controlling a quadrotor with an inverted pendulum, a complex underactuated system, by designing nonlinear controllers using feedback-linearization and CLF-QP approaches, achieving trajectory tracking for both quadrotor-only and combined cases.
The quadrotor is a $6$ degrees-of-freedom (DoF) system with underactuation. Adding a spherical pendulum on top of a quadrotor further complicates the task of achieving any output tracking while stabilizing the rest. In this report, we present different types of controllers for the nonlinear dynamical system of quadrotor and pendulum combination, utilizing feedback-linearization and control Lyapunov function with quadratic programming (CLF-QP) approaches. We demonstrated trajectory tracking for quadrotor-only case as well as quadrotor-pendulum-combined case.