Trajectory Tracking by Quadcopter using MPC in Presence of Obstacles and External Disturbances

The capability of smooth trajectory tracking is essential for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to perform several complex tasks. This paper proposes a collision-free framework for smooth trajectory tracking of rotary wing UAVs in the presence of any external disturbances in motion of the vehicle. For this, a simplified kinematic model is used which closely resembles the behaviour of rotary wing UAVs. A Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework together with on-demand collision avoidance constraints is proposed which penalizes rapid change in subsequent control inputs, thereby enabling trajectory tracking with minimum jerk, while also avoiding collision with any obstacle in the environment. Moreover, an Asynchronous Path Smoothing (APS) strategy is concatenated with the MPC framework to deal with the external disturbances in motion of the vehicle. Numerical simulations are presented to validate the efficacy of the proposed framework.