Intelligent Observer-Based Feedback Linearization for Autonomous Quadrotor Control

The presence of disturbances can cause instability to the quadrotor flight and can be dangerous especially when operating near obstacles or other aerial vehicles. In this paper, a hybrid controller called state feedback with intelligent disturbance observer-based control (SF-iDOBC) is developed for trajectory tracking of quadrotor in the presence of time-varying disturbances, e.g. wind. This is achieved by integrating artificial intelligence (AI) technique with disturbance observer-based feedback linearization to achieve a better disturbance rejection capability. Here, the observer estimates the disturbances acting on the quadrotor, while AI technique using the radial basis func-tion neural network (RBFNN) compensates the disturbance estimation error. To improve the error compensation of RBFNN, the k-means clustering method is used to find the optimal centers of the Gaussian activation function. In addition, the weights of the RBFNN are tuned online using the derived adaptation law based on the Lyapunov method, which eliminates the offline training. In the simulation experiment conducted, a total of four input nodes and five hidden neurons are used to compensate for the error. The results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness and merits of the theoretical development.