Nonlinear Extended State Observer Based Prescribed Performance Control for Quadrotor UAV with Attitude and Input Saturation Constraints

In this paper, a prescribed performance control scheme of the quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) under attitude and input saturation constraints is introduced. According to the underactuated feature, the quadrotor UAV system can be decomposed into an underactuated subsystem and a fully actuated subsystem. With the feedback linearization technique, a single nonlinear extended state observer (ESO) is proposed, and multiple observations are utilized to estimate both matched and unmatched disturbances, which not only can obtain a uniform convergence, but also reduces the complexity of the observer’s parameter adjustment. To improve system stability, an input saturation algorithm for each single rotor is introduced to modify the final control output. In addition, the limited attitude for the quadrotor UAV is also considered as a saturation constraint in the control scheme with a compensation auxiliary system. On this basis, dynamic surface control (DSC) with prescribed performance is adopted to guarantee the bounded convergence and steady-state error. All state errors of the closed-loop system are proven to be uniformly bounded using the Lyapunov theory, and the simulation results are given to demonstrate the stability, effectiveness, and superiority of the proposed control strategies at last.