Application of Frequency-Limited Adaptive Quadrocopter Control

Adaptive control systems have long been used to effectively control dynamical systems without excessive reliance on system models. This is due mainly to the fact that adaptive control guarantees stability, the same however, cannot be said for performance; adaptive control systems may exhibit poor tracking during transient (learning) time. This paper discusses the experimental implementation of a new architecture to model reference adaptive control, specifically, the reference system is augmented with a novel mismatch term representing the high-frequency content of the system tracking error. This mismatch term is an effective tool to remove the high frequency content of the error signal used in the adaptive element update law. The augmented architecture therefore allows high-gain adaptation without the usual side-effect of high-frequency oscillations. The proposed control architecture is validated using the Georgia Tech unmanned aerial vehicle simulation tool (GUST) and also implemented on the Georgia Tech Quadrocpoter (GTQ). It is shown that the new framework allows the system to adapt quickly to suppress the effect of uncertainty without the usual side effects of high gain adaptation such as high-frequency oscillations.