Attitude tracking control of a quadrotor UAV in the exponential coordinates

A new approach to control the attitude of a quadrotor UAV in terms of the exponential coordinates is developed in this paper. The exponential coordinate is a minimal representation of the rotation matrix, but it can avoid singularities. Since the quadrotor UAV can be considered as a rigid body aircraft, the analytic closed-form expressions of a rigid body's attitude kinematics are derived from differential of exponential on SO(3). Furthermore, based on the exponential expressions of attitude kinematics, the controller of a fully actuated rigid body is designed using trajectory linearization control method. The overall attitude controller contains two loops, which are designed according to the torque equation and the angular velocity equation respectively. In the numerical simulation, the proposed attitude controller is compared to a controller in the Euler angles, showing that singularities induced by Euler angles are avoided by using exponential coordinates. The robustness test of the attitude controller is also demonstrated in the simulation. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method can be applied to the attitude tracking control of an aerial robot especially when the robot needs to make aggressive maneuverings.