Attitude tracking control of small-scale unmanned helicopters using quaternion-based adaptive dynamic surface control

In this paper, a quaternion-based adaptive dynamic surface control method is proposed for attitude tracking control for small-scale unmanned helicopters with external disturbance and uncertain dynamics. The quaternion formalism is introduced and a quaternion-based multi-input-multi-output nonlinear model is derived from the attitude dynamics of a small-scale helicopter. The low-complexity controllers are designed by the dynamic surface control method as it eliminates the problem of the explosion of items. The singularity problem is avoided by substituting Euler kinematic equations in the nonlinear model with quaternion expressions and integrating the quaternion expressions into the design process of the dynamic surface control. For improving the robustness of the control system, the radial basis function networks are applied to approximate the uncertain dynamics. The external disturbance is also compensated in the controllers' design. This paper proves that the proposed method can guarantee the uniformly ultimate boundness of this attitude system. Simulation results are presented finally and show the effectiveness of this control approach.