Self-Triggered Control for Small Unmanned Aerial Rotorcrafts Based on Hierarchical Strategy

Small unmanned aerial rotorcrafts (SUARs) have garnered widespread attention in recent years due to their applications in various fields such as aerial photography, surveillance, search and rescue, and agriculture, with particular emphasis on the control issues associated with these rotorcrafts. Central to the discourse surrounding SUARs is the nuanced investigation of control methodologies pertinent to their operational dynamics. This paper contributes to this discourse by presenting a hierarchical-based self-triggered controller design approach for SUARs, aiming to reduce communication resource usage while ensuring system stability. The proposed hierarchical framework intends to optimize the self-triggered control structure wherein the upper layer serves as the trigger layer for triggering interval calculation and the lower layer as the control layer for determining control inputs. Within this hierarchical framework, a cyclic iterative solution method is introduced. After setting an initial inter-execution interval at the upper layer, the lower layer controller optimizes the specified performance index for the given triggering interval time domain to calculate the optimal control input, which is then fed back to the upper layer trigger for computing the next maximum triggering interval while ensuring system stability. Simulation results on the SUARs model validate the effectiveness and superiority of this method.