Real time Autopilot based on Immersion & Invariance for Autonomous Aerial Vehicle

UAV's will play a significant role in some future ground operations. Therefore, the exploration of the applicability level of advanced control laws or new developments and the resulting performance is of a great interest. Thus, this paper deals with the application of Immersion and Invariance (I&I) based approach to control a Quad-Rotor. This control manages the longitudinal and lateral motions. The main objective is in the one hand to maintain the vehicle stable throughout the whole generated trajectory that may be composed of different type line segments or arcs, with and without disturbances and in the other hand, to ensure an adequate behavior of the vehicle when passing through defined way-points. The system is modeled via Euler-Newton formalism and the control architecture is arranged in two levels. The first one executes a control law for altitude and yaw motions derived by using a feedback linearization technique. The second level concerns the movement in the XY-plan using I&I approach. A series of experimental tests are performed on a vehicle available in our laboratory for which one demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.