The Design of an Adaptive Backstepping Tracking Controller for Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

This paper addresses the control challenges of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are characterized by underactuation, strong coupling, and nonlinearity. An adaptive backstepping trajectory tracking controller is proposed. By transforming the quadrotor model into a strict-feedback form and considering external disturbances, the combination of backstepping control and adaptive techniques is employed to address the difficulties in controlling nonlinear systems and to estimate the upper bounds of unknown disturbances. This approach achieves a balance between controllability and robustness. The performance of the controller is verified through virtual simulations in Simulink. The results demonstrate that the proposed controller exhibits excellent robustness and tracking performance in the presence of external disturbances, enabling fast and stable control of the quadrotor UAV. This significantly outperforms traditional PID controllers.