Active disturbance rejection control for a quadrotor UAV

The design of robust tracking control for a quadrotor is an important and challenging problem nowadays. In the paper, an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) technique is developed for attitude and altitude tracking of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system subject to external disturbances. The nonlinear dynamics model of quadrotor is first obtained by Newton-Euler formula. Then, the control law, consisting of tracking differentiator (TD), extended state observers (ESO) and state error feedback (SEF) is designed. Finally, numerical simulations and experimental tests are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.