Adaptive Nonlinear Control of a Bicopter with Unknown Dynamics

This paper presents an adaptive, model-based, nonlinear controller for the bicopter trajectory-tracking problem. The nonlinear controller is constructed by dynamically extending the bicopter model, stabilizing the extended dynamics using input-output linearization, augmenting the controller with a finite-time convergent parameter estimator, and designing a linear tracking controller. Unlike control systems based on the time separation principle to separate the translational and rotational dynamics, the proposed technique is applied to design a controller for the full nonlinear dynamics of the system to obtain the desired transient performance. The proposed controller is validated in simulation for a smooth and nonsmooth trajectory-tracking problem.