Quadrotor Flight Envelope Protection with Trajectory and Yaw Tracking

This study proposes a reference governor control strategy to ensure that a quadrotor drone follows a planar trajectory while respecting the prescribed safety constraints. These constraints, including polynomial constraints accounting for aerodynamic and gyroscopic effects, were transformed into linear constraints using novel state-space augmentation. This allows for the design of a reference governor, which is designed to safeguard the drone’s flight envelope by adjusting the reference trajectory during trajectory tracking while also ensuring yaw tracking with lower priority than position tracking, especially when constraints are at risk of being violated. This study also presents simulations that illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.