Dynamic Attitude Planning for Trajectory Tracking in Thrust-Vectoring UAVs

This paper addresses the trajectory tracking control problem for underactuated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), with specific focus on vehicles with thrust-vectoring capabilities. According to the different actuation mechanisms, the most common UAV platforms can achieve only a partial decoupling of attitude and position tasks. Since position tracking is of utmost importance for applications involving aerial vehicles, we propose a control scheme in which position tracking is the primary objective. To this end, this paper exploits the concept of attitude planner, a dynamical system through which the desired attitude reference is processed to guarantee the satisfaction of the primary objective: The attitude tracking task is considered as a secondary objective, which can be realized as long as the desired trajectory satisfies specific trackability conditions.