Stabilized Control of a Drone with Active Disturbance Rejection Control

Abstract

The goal of this research is to design a robust stabilized control of a drone in severe environments, especially in strong wind areas or package delivery. We adopted the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) in this project due to its ability to estimate the disturbance without knowing an accurate model of disturbance. Considering the limitation of drone hardware, instead of third-order nonlinear extended state observer in ADRC, we used a second-order linear extended state observer to estimate disturbance. The performance of the ADRC based control law is experimentally validated on a real quadcopter. According to the experiment data, ADRC shows significant improvements in stabilized control of a drone compared to the conventional PID control.