Real-Flight-Path Tracking Control Design for Quadrotor UAVs: A Precision-Guided Approach

This study presents the design and implementation of a real-time flight-path tracking control system for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capable of accurately following a mobile ground target under dynamic and uncertain environmental conditions. The proposed framework integrates classical fixed-gain PID regulation executed on Pixhawk with its built-in adaptive mechanisms, namely autotuning, hover-throttle learning, and dynamic harmonic notch filtering, to enhance robustness under communication latency and disturbances. No machine learning PID tuning is used on Pixhawk; adaptive features are estimator based rather than ML based. The proposed system addresses critical challenges in trajectory tracking, including real-time delay compensation between the UAV and rover, external perturbations, and the requirement to maintain stable six-degree-of-freedom (DOF) control of altitude, yaw, pitch, and roll. A dynamic mathematical model, formulated using ordinary differential equations with embedded delay elements, is developed to emulate real-world flight behavior and validate control performance. Experimental evaluation demonstrates robust path-tracking accuracy, attitude stability, and responsiveness across diverse terrains and weather conditions, achieving a mean positional error below one meter and effective resilience against an 8.2 ms communication delay. Overall, this work establishes a scalable, computationally efficient, and high-precision control framework for UAV guidance and cooperative ground-target tracking, with potential applications in autonomous navigation, search-and-rescue operations, infrastructure inspection, and intelligent surveillance. The term “delay-aware” in this work refers to the explicit modeling of the measured 8.2 ms end-to-end delay and the use of Pixhawk’s estimator-based adaptive mechanisms, without any machine learning-based PID tuning.