Elastic Disturbance-Compensation-Based Event-Triggered Control for a Constrained Quadrotor UAV

Abstract

This article investigates an elastic disturbance-compensation-based event-triggered control (EDC-ETC) problem for a communication-restricted quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) subject to actuator saturation backlash and external disturbances. First, to quickly and accurately estimate unknown external disturbances, cascade disturbance observers are proposed by employing multilevel disturbance error estimations; furthermore, in order to utilize beneficial disturbances in enhancing the stability of the quadrotor UAV elastically, an elastic disturbance-compensation strategy is introduced using rigorous theoretical analysis. The effect caused by actuator saturation backlash is removed by adopting an auxiliary system design method. Then, based on the aforementioned disturbance and constraint compensation mechanism, an EDC-ETC scheme with appropriate design parameters is developed to ensure that the trajectory tracking errors of the closed-loop system for a quadrotor UAV converge to a small neighborhood of zero while saving communication and computational resources. Finally, numerical simulations are performed to validate that the proposed scheme is feasible and better than some advanced control algorithms.