Optimal Trajectory Generation and Tracking Control of a Single Coaxial Rotor UAV

Abstract

This paper investigates the application of optimal control to the experimental flight of a Single Coaxial Rotor (SCR) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) conducted in the indoor flight facility of the National Defense Academy (NDA) of Japan. The optimal control problem is prescribed as a minimum-length obstacle avoidance maneuver of the SCR UAV and it is solved using pseudospectral (PS) optimal control theory. The optimal trajectory is computed offline as a kinematic path-planning problem and then provided to the real UAV system as reference input commands. While only preliminary studies have been conducted at NDA, the results provide nominal tracking performance and validate the feasibility of the approach.