Passivity-based adaptive backstepping control of quadrotor-type UAVs

•Novel passivity-based adaptive backstepping control of under-actuated quadrotors.•Demonstrated for the velocity field and trajectory tracking control of the quadrotors.•Applied for stable haptic teleoperation of the quadrotor over the Internet.

We propose a novel unified passivity-based adaptive backstepping control framework for “mixed” quadrotor-type unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which consists of the translation dynamics with thrust force input λ∈ℜλ∈ℜ and the attitude kinematics with the angular velocity input w∈ℜ3w∈ℜ3 evolving on SE(3). We also show how our proposed unified framework can be used for velocity field following, timed trajectory tracking and haptic interaction over the Internet, while also providing a complete stability (or collision avoidance) analysis. Experiments using a real quadrotor and lossy communication (for the teleoperation) are also performed to illustrate the theory.