Summary
In the face of the growing relevance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) applications, especially quadcopter drones, this paper presents the application of the State-Dependent Riccati Equation (SDRE) nonlinear optimal control technique for attitude control of a quadcopter in aggressive trajectories. In simulation, three cascaded control configurations are compared: one system using a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) attitude controller, another with a Linear Quadratic Tracking (LQT) controller, and finally, one with a nonlinear SDRE controller. The configurations were subjected to an aggressive trajectory, and the results indicate the effectiveness of the SDRE controller compared to other linear techniques.
