Nonlinear Model Predictive Control of a Fully-actuated UAV on SE(3) using Acceleration Characteristics of the Structure

This paper presents a nonlinear model predictive control problem of a fully-actuated hexrotor unmanned aerial vehicle. First, mathematical preliminaries of rigid body dynamics are described, and the hexrotor dynamics on the special Euclidean group SE(3) is formulated. By using log operator on the special orthogonal group SO(3), the state error is calculated without relying on local representations such as Euler angles. A quadratic cost function is then defined using the presented state error function, and a nonlinear optimal control problem is considered. Nonlinear model predictive control scheme enables to consider input constraints and the cost of gravity compensation. The numerical simulation result shows that the model predictive controller chooses energy-efficient input for each structure considering its acceleration characteristics.