L 1 Quad: L 1 Adaptive Augmentation of Geometric Control for Agile Quadrotors With Performance Guarantees
Zhuohuan Wu, Sheng Cheng, Pan Zhao, Aditya Gahlawat, Kasey A. Ackerman, Arun Lakshmanan, Chengyu Yang, Jiahao Yu, Naira Hovakimyan · IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology · 2025
Quadrotors that can operate predictably in the presence of imperfect model knowledge and external disturbances are crucial in safety-critical applications. We present${\boldsymbol}{\mathcal{L}}_1$Quad, a control architecture that ensures uniformly bounded transient response of the quadrotor’s uncertain dynamics on the special Euclidean group SE(3). By leveraging the geometric controller and the${\boldsymbol}{\mathcal{L}}_1$adaptive controller, the${\boldsymbol}{\mathcal{L}}_1$Quad architecture provides a theoretically justified framework for the design and analysis of quadrotor’s tracking controller in the presence of nonlinear (time-and state-dependent) uncertainties on both the translational and rotational dynamics. In addition, we validate the performance of the${\boldsymbol}{\mathcal{L}}_1$Quad architecture through extensive experiments for 11 types of uncertainties across various trajectories. The results demonstrate that the${\boldsymbol}{\mathcal{L}}_1$Quad can achieve consistently small tracking errors despite the uncertainties and disturbances and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art controllers.