Fast Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for Multicopter Attitude Tracking on SO(3)

This video shows trajectory tracking of a hexacopter under propeller failure. It accompanies the controls paper referenced below. Reference Kamel, Mina, et al. "Fast nonlinear model predictive control for multicopter attitude tracking on SO (3)." Control Applications (CCA), 2015 IEEE Conference on. IEEE, 2015. Abstract Exploiting the highly dynamic flight envelope of a multirotor Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) is a particularly challenging task that requires special treatment of its attitude control loop. In this paper, we propose a fast nonlinear model predictive control approach based on a geometric formulation of the error to track the MAV attitude on the SO(3) special orthogonal group. The proposed controller is combined with an optimal position tracking control strategy in a cascaded fashion. The overall framework is implemented on-board a hexacopter and verified in both high fidelity simulations as well as extensive experimental studies. As shown, the resulting closed-loop system exploits the dynamics of the platform, is able to track aggressive trajectories, recover from arbitrary attitude configurations and also handle a propeller failure