Gust disturbance alleviation with Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are limited in their operation outdoors near obstacles by their ability to withstand wind gusts. Currently widespread position control methods such as Proportional Integral Derivative control do not perform well under the influence of gusts. Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) is a sensor-based control technique that can control nonlinear systems subject to disturbances. This method was developed for the attitude control of MAVs, but in this paper we generalize this method to the outer loop control of MAVs under gust loads. Significant improvements over a traditional Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller are demonstrated in an experiment where the drone flies in and out of a fan's wake. The control method does not rely on frequent position updates, so it is ready to be applied outside with standard GPS modules.