Attitude tracking control of a quadrotor based on linear active disturbance rejective control

A quadrotor is a typical multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), underactuated, strong coupled nonlinear system with parameter uncertainty and unmodeled disturbance. To track the desired attitude and height, a linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC) approach is utilized for the quadrotor control. LADRC has the capacity of estimating and compensating the generalized disturbance, and reduce the system to a unit gain double integrator, which is easily implemented and robust to environment disturbances. A simplified dynamic model of quadrotor is established using Newton-Euler equations. The design of LADRC is verified through numerical simulation and compared with PID controller. Simulation results indicate the LADRC can be used to achieve good performance in tracking the desired attitude and height.