Passivity-Based Control for a Micro Air Vehicle using Unit Quaternions

In this paper the development and practical implementation of a Passivity-Based
Control (PBC) algorithm to stabilize an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) described with unit
quaternions are presented. First, a mathematical model based on Euler-Lagrange formulation
using a logarithmic mapping in the quaternion space is introduced. Then, a new methodology:
a quaternion-passivity-based control is derived, which does not compute excessive and complex Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) for synthesizing the control law, making a significant advantage in comparison with other methodologies. Therefore, the control design to a system as the quad-rotor is easily solved by the proposed methodology. Another advantage is the possibility to stabilize quad-rotor full dynamics which may not be possible with classical PBC techniques. Experimental results and numerical simulations to validate our proposed scheme are presented.