Predictive Control for Autonomous Aerial Vehicles Trajectory Tracking

This paper addresses a predictive control strategy for Unmanned Air Vehicles in the presence of bounded disturbances. The goal is to guarantee tracking capabilities with respect to a reference trajectory which is pre-specified using the differential flatness formalism. Furthermore, an off-line linearization strategy of the nonlinear model of the vehicle along the flat trajectory is proposed. Since the reference trajectory is available beforehand, an optimization problem which minimizes the tracking error for the vehicle is formulated in a predictive control framework. The proposed method exhibits effective performance validated through software-in-the-loop simulations for the control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).