Adaptive geometric tracking control for quadrotors with aerodynamic drag compensation

We propose a geometric adaptive trajectorytracking controller for vectored-thrust unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with uncertain aerodynamic drag, inertial parameters, and control effectiveness. The uncertainty is represented in physics-based linear-in-parameters (LIP) form and compensated through a predictor-based augmentation of a nominal tracking controller. Residual and effectiveness deviations are compensated directly, whereas damping deviations are compensated only along the corresponding reference velocities, preserving their incremental dissipative action in the reduced tracking dynamics. The virtual acceleration is applied directly and its exact first derivative determines the planned angular velocity. The corresponding angular-acceleration feedforward uses the body angular acceleration generated by the rotational predictor. A predictor-consistent rotational coordinate and correction convert the resulting planner-derivative mismatch into a finiteenergy transformation of the angular-velocity prediction error. A uniform coupling condition guarantees well-posedness of the resulting predictor-acceleration relation. The translational baseline is required only to be uniformly input-to-state stable with respect to sufficiently small inputs, while the rotational baseline satisfies a local finite-energy robustness property. The proposed saturated PD-like translational realization in fact satisfies the stronger strong iISS property. These ingredients yield local asymptotic trajectory tracking.