Active Disturbance Rejection Control for the Trajectory Tracking of a Quadrotor

In the last decade, quadrotors have gained popularity among industry and academia due to their capabilities and the various applications in which they can be found. In addition to the above, because this is an underactuated system, researchers have found it a great challenge to control. Despite this, there is a wide variety of methodologies in the literature to control this type of system. Based on the above, this work proposed an alternative to trajectory tracking control for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The problem was divided into two main control loops: an outer control loop for the position coordinates, tackled through linear active disturbance rejection controllers (ADRC), and an inner control loop related to the orientation variables, addressed via robust proportional-integral-differential (PID) controllers. Furthermore, a generalized proportional integral observer (GPIO) was implemented to estimate the velocity and internal and external disturbances; therefore, the control strategy only depended on the attitude (position and orientation) quadrotor measurements. Then, the control performance was tested through numerical simulations and experimental tests, including wind disturbance inputs.