A Controller Based on PVTOL Control Signals for Guiding a Quadrotor in 3D Navigation Tasks

In this work a novel control architecture is proposed to guide an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), specifically a quadrotor, in 3D flights correspondent to positioning and path-following tasks. Such an architecture is based on the fusion of three control signals generated by three simpler controllers (associated to PVTOL tasks). Considering the whole navigation as a task composed by the control of the vehicle orientation with respect to its target (associated to a Z-PVTOL controller), the control of its forward movement (associated to a XZ-PVTOL controller), and the correction of any side displacement (associated to a YZ-PVTOL controller, similar to the XZ-PVTOL controller), a first approach was to execute such partial maneuvers one each time, using the same three PVTOL controllers here adopted, switching from one to other of these controllers according to a supervisor. The new approach adopted in this paper corresponds to consider that the three PVTOL controllers act simultaneously, and generating the final control signal to be sent to the UAV through fusing the individual control signals generated by the PVTOL controllers, thus smoothly coupling three simpler controllers. Experimental results are presented to validate the proposed approach, and the performance of the controller thus designed is compared to the one correspondent to the switching approach.