Quaternion-Based Sliding Mode Control for Six Degrees of Freedom Flight Control of Quadrotors

2024-03-16

IEEE/RJS International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems

AI Summary

Existing quadrotor sliding-mode controllers suffer from Euler-angle singularities, complex quaternion unwinding compensation, and slow convergence of coordinate-free methods. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a six-degree-of-freedom cascaded sliding-mode controller: an outer loop employs a coordinate-free position planner ensuring global asymptotic stability, while the inner loop exploits the geometric properties of the unit-quaternion hypersphere to design a simplified attitude sliding-mode law that inherently eliminates unwinding. The architecture achieves both structural simplicity and strong robustness. Rigorous Lyapunov-based analysis proves global asymptotic stability. Experimental evaluations on aggressive maneuvers—including full flips and high-speed trajectory tracking—demonstrate significant improvements over three baseline methods: reduced control energy consumption, fewer actuator saturations, and enhanced resilience against model uncertainties and external disturbances.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: State Estimation
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: LLM based quality controls for crowd work

Abstract

Despite extensive research on sliding mode control (SMC) design for quadrotors, the existing approaches have certain limitations. Euler angle-based SMC formulations suffer from poor performance in high-pitch or -roll maneuvers. Quaternion-based SMC approaches have unwinding issues and complex architecture. Coordinate-free methods are slow and only almost globally stable. This paper presents a new six degrees of freedom SMC flight controller to address the above limitations. We use a cascaded architecture with a position controller in the outer loop and a quaternion-based attitude controller in the inner loop. The position controller generates the desired trajectory for the attitude controller using a coordinate-free approach. The quaternion-based attitude controller uses the natural characteristics of the quaternion hypersphere, featuring a simple structure while providing global stability and avoiding unwinding issues. We compare our controller with three other common control methods conducting challenging maneuvers like flip-over and high-speed trajectory tracking in the presence of model uncertainties and disturbances. Our controller consistently outperforms the benchmark approaches with less control effort and actuator saturation, offering highly effective and efficient flight control.

Problem

• Addresses poor performance in high-pitch/roll maneuvers
• Solves unwinding issues in quaternion-based SMC
• Improves slow convergence in coordinate-free methods

Innovation

• Quaternion-based attitude controller for global stability
• Cascaded architecture with position and attitude control
• Coordinate-free trajectory generation for simplicity