Toward Stable Position Control for High-Rate Spinning Small-Sized Quadrotors via a Practical Loop Shaping Scheme

This article proposes a practical actuator-level loop-shaping control method that enables stable position and attitude control of quadrotors undergoing continuous, high-rate yaw motion for omnidirectional perception. To this end, we first identify and formalize the key control challenges arising from high yaw rates. Accordingly, the proposed scheme is developed to compensate for the gyroscopic coupling, reject disturbances through integral control action, and accelerate actuator response via an extended-state-observer-based tracking differentiator that provides a feed-forward torque derivative. In addition to its control capabilities, the modular and lightweight design offers flexibility for integration with high-level position and attitude controllers and ensures low computational overhead for real-time onboard implementation. Real-flight experiments validate the proposed approach, demonstrating stable hovering and trajectory tracking at yaw rates up to 5.5 Hz—the fastest reported to date—while operating on a 480-MHz microcontroller with a computation time of only 3 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{s}$</tex-math></inline-formula> per cycle.