Backstepping Control on SE(3) of a Micro Quadrotor for Stable Trajectory Tracking

This paper presents a backstepping controller based on SE(3) to track the desired trajectory for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle. The controller consists of two parts: 1) a position control part and 2) an attitude control part. The position controller is used to track the desired Cartesian coordinates using position and velocity errors, while the attitude controller uses the rotation matrix error and body angular velocity error to stabilize attitude dynamics expressed on SO(3). Simulation results illustrate the more stable tracking performance of the proposed controller in noisy environments in comparison with geometric controller. Experimental results on a micro quadrotor show the satisfactory performance of the proposed controller.