Joint 48th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and
10
28th Chinese Control Conference
Shanghai, P.R. China, December 16-18, 2009
Quadrotor Aircraft control without Velocity Measurements
Ruifeng Zhang, Xinhua Wang and Kai-Yuan Cai
Abstract— In this paper a quadrotor aircraft is developed
with the signals of attitude angle and angular rate being filtered
by using frequency analysis. A PD sliding mode controller
is designed to stabilize the attitude and position while a
tracking-differentiator is employed to obtain the estimate of the
required velocity. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate
the developed quadrotor can be appropriately controlled in
terms of attitude as well as position.
I. I NTRODUCTION
In recent years, quadrotor aircraft has become as a popular
research topic [1-9]. The major advantage of this type of
aircraft includes heavy loading capacity, and simple but
reliable mechanical structure. Moreover, the corresponding
gyroscope moments generated by motors can be counteracted
each other. However, the attitude movement of this aircraft is
instable, so it is important to study the control of its attitude
movement. Wen and Kreutz-Delgado presented a kind of PD
controller for rigid body based on quaternions which can also
work in model-independent case. This controller is proved
to be able to stabilize attitude movement of a rigid body
with “guaranteed transient performance, and robustness”
[1]. Because a quadrotor can be treated as a rigid body
for the purpose of controller design, many studies on the
control of quadrotor aircraft follow the line of quaternions as
demonstrated in [1]. For example, a control method based on
linearization was presented in [2] to make a quadrotor aerial
robot ‘almost fly’, while [3] proposed a quaternion-based
feedback control scheme which compensated the Coriolis
and gyroscopic torques.
Position control is also necessary to make quadrotor
aircraft fly properly. Both the position and velocity mea-
surements or their estimates of the aircraft are needed in
position control. To this end, Pollini exploited a GPS re-
ceiver which was augmented with Initial Measurement Unit
(IMU) by an Extended Kalman Filter Navigation System
[4]. In [5], Hoffmann and Waslander compared the position
measurement accuracy of different sampling rates of GPS
fused with IMU. Experimental results showed that higher
sampling rate would produce higher accuracy of position
measurement. Ultrasonic sensors fusing with IMU [6] and
monocular vision with Moire Patterns [7] were also proposed
to obtain estimates of the position and velocity. Different
from the apparatus employed in [4-7], a motion capture
system (Vicon Positioning System) was adopted in the works
This work is supported by National Nature Science Foundation of China
(60774008) and Aviation Science Foundation of China (2008ZG51092).
The authors are with the National Key Laboratory of Science and
Technology on Integrated Control, the Department of Automatic Control,
Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Beijing, 100191, China
zhangruifengd635@gmail.com.
978-1-4244-3872-3/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE
ThBIn6.
presented in [8, 9]. Although the Vicon Positioning System
is capable of obtaining highly accurate position information
and achieving a high sampling rate, the way of calculating
the velocity using the position information was not clearly
provided in [8, 9].
In this paper we propose a tracking-differentiator [10,
11] to estimate the velocity of quadrotor aircraft by using
the position measurements collected by a Vicon Positioning
System available in the National Key Laboratory of Science
and Technology on Integrated Control, BUAA. In order to
verify the validity of the proposed tracking-differentiator, we
develop a small quadrotor prototype in the Laboratory, in
which a PD sliding mode controller based on quaternions
is designed to stabilize the attitude of the quadrotor, and a
control method based on linearization is adopted to control
the corresponding position. The information of attitude and
angle rate provided for the attitude controller is obtained
with an IMU and filtered by an integer-coefficient digital
filter. A tracking-differentiator [10, 11] is used to calculate
the velocity of the aircrafts in this paper.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In section
2, the mathematical model of the aircraft is given and the
control problem is stated. In section 3, an integer-coefficient
digital filter is proposed to restrain the effect of measurement
disturbances. In sections 4 and 5, the attitude controller
and position controller are given respectively. In section 6,
the indoor flight experiment results are shown. And, the
conclusions are given in section 7.
II. P ROBLEM S TATEMENT
The quadrotor aircraft under consideration consists of a
rigid cross frame equipped with four rotors as shown in
Fig. 1. The up (down) motion is achieved by increasing
(decreasing) the total thrust while maintaining an equal
individual thrust. The forward/backward, left/right and the
yaw motions are achieved through a differential control
strategy of the thrust generated by each rotor. In order to
avoid the yaw drift due to the reactive torques, the quadrotor
aircraft is configured such that the set of rotors (right-left)
rotates clockwise and the set of rotors (front-end) rotates
counterclockwise. There is no change in the direction of
rotation of the rotors. If a yaw motion is desired, one has to
reduce the thrust of one set of rotors and increase the thrust of
the other set while maintaining the same total thrust to avoid
an up-down motion. Hence, the yaw motion is then realized
in the direction of the induced reactive torque. On the other
hand, forward (backward) motion is achieved by pitching in
the desired direction by increasing the end (front) rotor thrust
and decreasing the front (end) rotor thrust to maintain the
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total thrust. Finally, a sideways motion is achieved by rolling or, equivalently,

in the desired direction by increasing the left (right) rotor
thrust and decreasing the right (left) rotor thrust to maintain Ω̇ = −J −1 Ω × JΩ + J −1 Γ
the total thrust. where J ∈ <3×3 denotes the inertial matrix and the Γ ∈
<3×3 denotes the total control moment vector.
F2 yaw F1
Use F1 , F3 , F2 , F4 to denote the lift forces generated by
the front, end, left and right rotors, respectively. Then, the
left e3B roll
pitch ¯ front total force FH satisfies
e2B e1B
F3 F4
Sb
FH = F1 + F3 + F2 + F4
e3I
end right
In the quadrotor aircraft, if the four rotors rotate at the
Sg
e2I e1I same speed, there will be no yaw motion as the reactive
torques are cancelled out (the reader is referred to [3] for
detailed discussion about this point). Therefore, we can get
Fig. 1. Sketch map of quadrotor aircraft  
µ ¶ F1
Γ  F3 
In Fig.1, Sg denotes the inertial frame; Sb denotes the body
£ ¤T £ ¤T =M  F2 

FH
frame; ξ = x y z ∈ Sg and v = ẋ ẏ ż de-
F4
note the mass center position and the velocity of the aircraft
 
in the inertial frame, respectively; The Fi lift generated by 0 0 d + ∆dl −d − ∆dr
the rotor in the free air (expressed in Sb ). The linear motion  d + ∆df −d − ∆de 0 0 
equations are given as follows: M =  k1 /α1

k2 /α2 k3 /α3 k4 /α4 
1 1 1 1
ξ˙ = v
TH ReZ where d denotes the average distance between lift forces
v̇ = gez − and mass center; df , de , dl , dr are the distances between
m
where m denotes the aircraft mass; £g denotes the the operating points of the four lift forces and the center
¤Tacceleration of gravity, respectively; ∆dl = |dl − d|, ∆dr = |dr − d|,
due to the gravity; the vector ez = 0 0 1 denotes the
∆df = |df − d|, ∆de = |de − d|; the term ki /αi ( i =
unit vector in the frame Sg ; the orthogonal matrix R ∈ <3×3
1, ..., 4) denotes the ratio between the lift force generated
depends on the pitch angle ϑ, the yaw angle ψ and the roll
by the rotor and the corresponding reactive torque. Define
angle φ, and is further expressed as
  £ ¤T
cϑcψ cψsϑsφ − sψcφ cψsϑcφ + sψsφ MF , M F1 F3 F2 F4
R =  sψcϑ sψsϑsφ + cψcφ sψsϑcφ − cψsφ  (1) then, we obtain
−sϑ cϑsφ cϑcφ · ¸
Γ
MF =
with c· = cos(·), s· = sin(·). By quaternion, the kinematics FH
dynamics of the aircraft are described as Now, we are ready to state the main objective of this
1 paper. That is, design appropriate filters and attitude/position
q̇ = (q × Ω + q0 Ω) controllers for the aircraft based on the above mathematical
2
1 models.
q̇0 = − ΩT q (2)
2
III. F ILTER D ESIGN
R = R · sk(Ω)
In this section, an integer-coefficient digital filter is pro-
where the vector (q, q0 ) ∈ <4 represents the so-called unit posed to restrain the measurement disturbances.
quaternion representation of the orientation (see [3] and the The frequency property of integer coefficient digital filter
references therein) with the q0 and q subject to the constraint is described by
condition q T q + q02 = 1; the Ω denotes the angular velocity
of the airframe expressed in the frame Sb ; the sk(Ω) denotes +∞
X
the skew-symmetric matrix given by H(ejω ) = h(k)e−jωk (4)
  k=−∞
0 −Ωz Ωy
sk(Ω) =  Ωz 0 −Ωx  where h(k) represents the impulse response of the filter’s
−Ωy Ωx 0 transfer function.
In this paper, we choose
The attitude dynamics equations are
1 − z −N
J Ω̇ = −Ω × JΩ + Γ (3) H(z) = (5)
1 − z −1
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then the (4) can be written as

sin(ωN/2)
H(ejω ) = e−j(N −1)ω/2 , N = 1, 2, 3... (6)
sin(ω/2)
Noting (6), we can get an appropriate filter by selecting
N properly. For thirty percent of the original PWM wave
signal, the corresponding power spectrum is shown in Fig.2.
From Fig.2, we see that the high frequency components
have obvious saliences. To avoid big time delays, the degree
of the filter (i.e. N ) should not be too high. And, it is better
to make the coefficient be integer. In our design, according
to the frequency-magnitude curve of the filet plotted in Fig.3,
we select N = 5.
Fig. 4. The power spectrum of the signal after filtering
The power spectrum of filtered signal with N = 5 is
shown in Fig. 4.
From Fig.2 and Fig.4, it is seen that the filtered signal has where Γ = Γt + d with the disturbance d and the control
a better spectrum property than the original one. torque Γt denoted by
£ ¤T
Γt = M T 1 M T 2 M T 3

Choose the attitude control law as

Γt = Γm + Γa (7)

where
Γm = −Ω − q (8)

Γa = −Ks sign(Ω + q) (9)

For the attitude control law (7), the sliding mode control
term Γa expressed in (9) is used to restrain the disturbance
d and the other term Γm expressed in (8) represents a PD
controller. In fact, without considering the disturbance (i.e.
Fig. 2. The frequency spectrum of a signal without filter
considering d ≡ 0), the PD control term can render the
aircraft stable. However, to deal with big disturbances, the
sliding mode control term is required.
To show the stability of the resulting closed-loop attitude
system with the controller (7), we consider the sliding
variable s = Ω + q. Let the Lyapunov function be
N=5
V = sT s

From (2), (3) and (7) we obtain

£ ¤
V̇ = sT q × Ω + q0 Ω − 2J −1 (Γt + d)
= sT {[sk(q) + q0 I] Ω − 2J −1 Ω × JΩ
+ 2J −1 (Γt + d)},

where I ∈ R3×3 is a identical matrix. It can be derived that

Γt = J [−s − Ks sign(s)]

Fig. 3. The magnitude and frequency curve of the filter where

£ ¤
sign(s) = sign(s1 ) sign(s2 ) sign(s3 )
IV. ATTITUDE C ONTROLLER D ESIGN Let
Rewrite the equation (3) as follows: £ 0 0 ¤T
∆= K1 K20 K3
J Ω̇ = −Ω × JΩ + Γt + d = [sk(q) + q0 I3 ] Ω − 2J −1 Ω × JΩ + 2J −1 d

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and where ṽ˙ denotes the derivative of the signal ṽ, and O(εργ−1 )
denotes the approximation of order εργ−1 between x2 and
Ks = diag(K1 , K2 , K3 ), ṽ.
¯ 0¯ ¯ 0¯ ¯ 0¯
¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ In the following, we will design the position and velocity
(K1 > ¯K1 ¯ , K2 > ¯K2 ¯ , K3 > ¯K3 ¯)
feedback controller.
Therefore, we get Since the roll and pitch angle are relatively small, the
linearization method can be adopted. And, we choose the
V̇ = sT (∆ + J −1 Γt ) position control law as
= sT [∆ − s − Ks sign(s)]    
Fxg −K1x x − K2x ẋ
X3 ³ ´
0 Fg =  Fyg  =  −K1y y − K2y ẏ  (11)
= −sT s − Ki |si | − Ki si
Fzg −mg
i=1
X3 ³ ´ where K1x , K2x , K1y and K2y are positive parameters to
2 0
≤ − ksk − Ki |si | − Ki |si | (10) be specified.
i=1 We can obtain Fb expressed in the body frame. Noting
3
X
2 0 that £ ¤T
= − ksk − (Ki − Ki ) |si | Fb = 0 0 −mg , mg = FH
i=1
< −K̄ ksk < 0 we obtain
¯ 0¯  
¯ ¯ cψsϑcφ + sψsφ
where K̄ = min (Ki − ¯Ki ¯). fg = Rgb Fb = −  sψsϑcφ − cψsφ  FH (12)
i=1,2,3
From (10), we know that there exists a time ts such that cϑcφ
s = q + Ω = 0 for t ≥ ts , i.e. q = −Ω for t ≥ ts . It then
where fg denotes the gravity expressed in the body frame,
follows from (2) that, for t ≥ ts ,
the transfer matrix Rgb (from the body frame to the inertial
1 1 frame) is equal to the R matrix defined in (1).
q̇ = − q0 q, q̇0 = q T q
2 2 To get the desired values of ϑ, φ noting (11) and (12), we
Select the Lyapunov function as W = q T q+(1−q0 )2 , whose let    
Fxg cψsϑcφ + sψsφ
time derivative along the solution of above equation satisfies  Fyg  = −  sψsϑcφ − cψsφ  FH (13)
Ẇ = −q T q0 q − (1 − q0 )q T q Fzg cϑcφ
= −q T q Since ϑ, φ are relatively small, by linearizing (13) we get
< 0    
Fxg ϑ cos ψ + φ sin ψ
Therefore, q → 0, Ω → 0 as t → ∞.  Fyg  = −  ϑ sin ψ − φ cos ψ  FH (14)
In the following section, we will present a differentiator- Fzg 1
based position controller for the quadrotor aircraft.
From (14) we obtain
V. P OSITION AND V ELOCITY F EEDBACK C ONTROL ϑd =
Fxg cψ+Fyg sψ
Fzg
The key of feedback control is to obtain the position and Fxg sψ−Fyg cψ (15)
φd = Fzg
velocity signals of the aircraft. We use Vicon system to catch
the position of the aircraft. The velocity of the aircraft is With the Fxg , Fyg , Fzg given in (11) and the measured ψ,
obtained by the tracking-differentiators proposed in [10] and we can use the equation (15) to compute the desired values
[11]. And, the second-order differentiator is of ϑ, φ denoted by ϑd , φd respectively.
By regulating the PD controller parameters, the acceptable
ẋ1 = x2 response can be carried out even without the model of
2 quadrotor aricraft. As a result, the closed-loop system is
ε ẋ2 = −a10 (x1 − ṽ(t))
α
− a11 |x1 − ṽ(t)| sign(x1 − ṽ(t)) stable. Physically, the aircraft hovers in the given position.
α
− a20 εx2 − a21 |εx2 | sign |x2 | VI. E XPERIMENT
ȳ = x2 A. Hardware Design of Quadrotor Aircraft.
where 0 < ε < 1 is the perturbation parameter; 0 < α < 1, We develop a quadrotor aircraft prototype shown in Fig.5.
a10 , a11 , a20 and a21 are positive design constants, ṽ is the In this aircraft, an Electric Speed Controller (ESC, RCE-
position signal obtained from Vicon system. Therefore, there BL35X) based on Pulse width modulation (PWM) is adopted
exists a positive number γ satisfying ργ > 2 (where ρ = α), to regular the speed of Brushless Direct Current (BLDC)
such that motors. Its peaking current is 45A, and constant current is
35A, moreover, the input voltage is 5.5-16.8v. This type
x1 − ṽ = O(εργ ), x2 − ṽ˙ = O(εργ−1 ) of ESC is relatively cheap and reliable. Its shortest regular

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period we can get is 2.5ms by experiments. IMU (XSENS

MTi) is selected as the mail attitude sensor. Therefore, the
3-axis angles and angular rates can be obtained. A DSP
(TMS320LF2812) is taken as the driven board, which has
multiple PWM output channels. The control period is 8ms.

Fig. 6. Flying test with Vicon system on guaranteeing plane

Fig. 5. Prototype of quadrotor aircraft

Fig. 7. Flying test with Vicon system

B. The parameters of the aircraft

The parameters are: m = 2.33kg, g = 9.81m/s2 . The

moment of inertia is

 
Jxx 0 0
J = 0 Jyy 0 
0 0 Jzz

where Jxx = 0.16N m, Jyy = 0.16N m, Jzz = 0.32N m.

Voltage range of BLDC motors is 6-18v, weight is 78g,
max power is 340w, and maximum thrust is 1400g. The four
rotors are all airscrew woody. The differentiator parameters
is chosen as ε = 0.002, a10 = 0.1, a11 = 0.015, b10 = Fig. 8. The position and velocity in x-axis
0.3, b11 = 0.3.
Flying test with motion capture system (Vicon system) on
guaranteeing plane is shown in Fig.6, while flying test with
Vicon system is shown in Fig.7.
In Fig.8, x is the X-axis position signal obtained by Vicon
system, whose time derivative, denoting the X-axis velocity,
is obtained from tracking-differentiator. In Fig.9, y is the Y-
axis position signal obtained by Vicon system, whose time
derivative, denoting the Y-axis velocity, is obtained from
tracking-differentiator as well. Fig.10 shows roll and pitch
angles. Fig.11 and Fig.12 show the front, end, left and right
forces generated by the four rotors, respectively. Though the
position signals have frequent erroneous readings from Vicon
system, the velocities obtained from tracking-differentiator
still have satisfying quality, and the noises are restrained
sufficiently by the tracking-differentiator. At the same time, Fig. 9. The position and velocity in y-axis
excellent stability performance is obtained.

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quent erroneous readings, and excellent position and attitude

stability of aircraft are guaranteed.

R EFERENCES
[1] J. T. Y. Wen and K. Kreutz-Delgado, “The attitude control problem,”
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Fig. 10. Roll and pitch angles
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Fig. 12 Left and right forces

The experiment video of the aircraft is shown in the

following web address:
http://you.video.sina.com.cn/b/19086673-1314556583.html,
or http://v.youku.com/v show/id XNzgzODE1MDA=.html.

VII. C ONCLUSIONS
In this paper a quadrotor aircraft is developed, and a PD
sliding mode controller is designed to stabilize the attitude
and position based on tracking-differentiator. Through the
experiments, the tracking-differentiator can overcome the fre-

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