The Regulation of a Quadrotor UAV Carrying a Pendulum using Receding Horizon Control

This paper proposes an approach for regulating the stability of an inverted pendulum that is attached on top of a moving quadrotor UAV. The approach is based on the receding horizon control scheme whose objective is to stabilize the pendulum in a vertical position while the quadrotor UAV is moving from predetermined initial to final poses. More specifically, the approach formulates a parametric quadratic optimization of the simultaneous stabilization of both the inverted pendulum and the quadrotor UAV. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the successful implementation of the proposed method.