Reduction of power consumption on quadrotor vehicles via trajectory design and a controller-gains tuning stage

This work presents a methodology for reducing power consumption on quadrotor vehicles. The proposed methodology combines both, a trajectory design procedure and a controller-gains tuning stage. The quadrotor is operated in closed-loop by means of a terminal sliding modes controller, whose stability analysis is provided by using a strict Lyapunov function. The trajectory design stage allows designing an optimal trajectory with smooth transitions by minimizing a criterion function using dynamic optimization theory. Furthermore, in order to reduce power consumption, a performance index depending on the tracking error and the quadrotor inputs is used on a control-gains tuning stage based on a nature inspired evolutionary meta-heuristic algorithm, namely the cuckoo search algorithm. The quadrotor terminal sliding modes controller is compared to another sliding mode control algorithm, and the performance of each controller is assessed by considering aero-dynamical disturbances and parametric uncertainties. Numerical simulations show that the tracking error and power consumption are reduced when the trajectory tracking and controller-gains tuning stages are used. Besides, it is shown that the proposed terminal sliding modes controller outperforms a conventional sliding mode control scheme.