Introducing switched adaptive control for quadrotors for vertical operations

Summary With the advent of intelligent transport, quadrotors are becoming an attractive solution while lifting or dropping of payloads during emergency evacuations, construction works, etc. During such operations, dynamic variations in (possibly unknown) payload cause considerable changes in the system dynamics. However, a systematic control solution to tackle such interchanging dynamical behavior is still missing. This paper proposes a switched dynamical framework to capture the interchanging dynamics of a quadrotor during vertical operations and a robust adaptive control solution to tackle such dynamics when it is unknown. The stability of the closed‐loop system is studied analytically and the effectiveness of the proposed solution is verified via simulations.