Cascaded incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion for MAV disturbance rejection

This paper presents the cascaded integration of Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) for attitude control and INDI for position control of micro air vehicles. Significant improvements over a traditional Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller are demonstrated in an experiment where the quadrotor flies in and out of a 10 m/s windtunnel exhaust. The control method does not rely on frequent position updates, as is demonstrated in an outside experiment using a standard GPS module. Finally, we investigate the effect of using a linearization to calculate thrust vector increments, compared to a nonlinear calculation.