Maneuver Regulation vs. Trajectory Tracking for Fully Actuated UAVs: A Dual Quaternion Approach

Maneuver regulation emerges as an optimal strategy to perform robust path following in presence of disturbances, exploiting vehicle controllability and improving performances w.r.t. trajectory tracking. In this work we consider maneuver regulation for a fully-actuated aerial platform in a dual quaternion framework, which yields the additional benefit of addressing the attitude and position control problem with a single state controller. To this aim, the nonlinear dynamics is first derived in a dual quaternion setup and then feedback linearized to enable the design of a stable maneuver regulator. This controller is compared with a standard PD scheme, w.r.t. the capability of following a desired trajectory, and is then further improved through the definition of a strategy to compensate for the cumulative delay due to external disturbances.