A Survey of Control Methods for Quadrotor UAV

Abstract

Flight control design of unmanned aerial vehicles UAVs is becoming increasingly important due to advances in computational power of computers with lower cost. The control algorithms are mainly employed for the attitude and position control of the UAVs. In the past decades, quadrotors have become the most popular UAVs, their adaptability and small size. They are employed to carry out tasks such as delivery, exploration,  fumigation, mapping, surveillance, rescue mission, traffic monitoring, and so on. While carrying out these tasks, quadrotor UAVs face various challenges, such as environmental disturbances, obstacles, and parametric and non-parametric perturbations. Therefore, they require robust and effective control to stabilize them and enhance their performance. This paper provides a survey of recent developments in control algorithms applied to attitude and position loops of quadrotor UAVs. In addition, the limitations of the previous control approaches are presented. In order to overcome the relative drawbacks of the previous control techniques and enhance the performance of the quadrotor, researchers are combining various control approaches to obtain the hybrid control architecture. In this study, a review of the recent hybrid control schemes is presented.