A Novel Quaternion-based Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion for Rigid Body Control

In this paper, a novel fully quaternion-based nonlinear dynamic inversion (NDI) controller is developed for attitude tracking of a rigid body in $\mathbb{R}^{3}$. Such a nonlinear controller finds its application in highly maneuverable systems such as satellites and quadrotors. The quaternion-based control avoids gimbal lock problem associated with Euler angles and allows almost global asymptotic stability. The attitude controller is well suited for rigid body systems like satellites which require minimising large-angle errors. Extensive simulations are performed on MATLAB to validate the proposed ideas and provide a comparison with existing works. A realistic physics-engine-based simulation is carried out in Gazebo to validate the proposed methodology on a quadrotor.