Nonlinear scenario‐based model predictive control for quadrotors with bidirectional thrust

Abstract

The control of quadrotor vehicles under state and parameter uncertainty is a well studied problem that is vitally important to the deployment of these systems under real world conditions. In this article, we propose a linearization‐based extension to nonlinear systems of the existing scenario model predictive control (MPC) framework, which quantifies the impact of uncertainty on the vehicle dynamics through repeated sampling of the uncertainty space. Given the computational costs of such an approach, we also propose two simplifications of the scenario MPC algorithm that are significantly more tractable. In order to evaluate the performance of the algorithms, the specific problem of the control of a bidirectionally actuated quadrotor vehicle is considered. Simulations are carried out for each scenario MPC scheme as well as for a reference deterministic MPC scheme. When a sufficiently large sample count is considered, each of the scenario MPC algorithms achieves safer performance than the deterministic formulation without sacrificing any optimality. Additionally, the approximate solution techniques conclusively outperform the original nonlinear scenario MPC formulation for the same computational cost.