Full Pose Tracking for a Tilt-Arm Quadrotor UAV

In this paper the modeling, control design and experimental validation of a tilt-arm quadrotor UAV are considered. We propose a control law that exploits the system actuation capabilities to address the full pose (position and attitude) trajectory tracking problem. For position tracking, we employ a quasi time-optimal solution that ensures global tracking and boundedness of the control force even in the presence of an unknown constant disturbance. The attitude tracking objective is handled by means of a geometric PID control law that accounts for a constant parasitic torque. Experimental results are provided to show the enhanced capabilities of thrust vectoring platforms with respect to coplanar multirotor ones and to assess the effectiveness of the control law.