Global Trajectory Tracking for a Quadrotor through Event-Triggered Control: Synthesis, Simulations, and Experiments*

Abstract

This paper presents an event-triggered controller that solves the problem of trajectory tracking for an aerial vehicle with a thrust actuation in a single body-fixed direction and full angular velocity actuation. Under the framework of hybrid dynamical systems, we first design a globally stabilizing hybrid control law and then derive an appropriate eventtriggering mechanism for sampling of actuation signals. We prove that bounded reference trajectories are rendered globally asymptotically stable for the closed-loop system. To enable practical implementation of the proposed event-triggered controller on digital platforms, we provide a modified event-triggering mechanism that achieves practical stability while avoiding Zeno solutions. The results are illustrated by numerical simulations and further verified by experiments.