Almost Global Trajectory Tracking for Quadrotors Using Thrust Direction Control on $\mathcalS^2$
<|reference_start|>Almost Global Trajectory Tracking for Quadrotors Using Thrust Direction Control on $\mathcalS^2$: Many of the existing works on quadrotor control address the trajectory tracking problem by employing a cascade design in which the translational and rotational dynamics are stabilized by two separate controllers. The stability of the cascade is often proved by employing trajectory-based arguments, most notably, integral input-to-state stability. In this paper, we follow a different route and present a control law ensuring that a composite function constructed from the translational and rotational tracking errors is a Lyapunov function for the closed-loop cascade. In particular, starting from a generic control law for the double integrator, we develop a suitable attitude control extension, by leveraging a backstepping-like procedure. Using this construction, we provide an almost global stability certificate. The proposed design employs the unit sphere $\mathcal{S}^2$ to describe the rotational degrees of freedom required for position control. This enables a simpler controller tuning and an improved tracking performance with respect to previous global solutions. The new design is demonstrated via numerical simulations and on real-world experiments.<|reference_end|>
@article{leomanni2024almost,
    title={Almost Global Trajectory Tracking for Quadrotors Using Thrust Direction
  Control on $\mathcal{S}^2$},
    author={Mirko Leomanni, Alberto Dionigi, Francesco Ferrante, Paolo Valigi,
  Gabriele Costante},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.05702},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2409.05702},
    primaryClass={eess.SY cs.SY}
}