Experimental results of concurrent learning adaptive controllers

Commonly used Proportional-Integral-Derivative based UAV flight controllers are of- ten seen to provide adequate trajectory-tracking performance only after extensive tuning. The gains of these controllers are tuned to particular platforms, which makes transferring controllers from one UAV to other time-intensive. This paper suggests the use of adaptive controllers in speeding up the process of extracting good control performance from new UAVs. In particular, it is shown that a concurrent learning adaptive controller improves the trajectory tracking performance of a quadrotor with baseline linear controller directly imported from another quadrotors whose inertial characteristics and throttle mapping are very different. Concurrent learning adaptive control uses specifically selected and online recorded data concurrently with instantaneous data and is capable of guaranteeing tracking error and weight error convergence without requiring persistency of excitation. Flight-test results are presented on indoor quadrotor platforms operated in MIT's RAVEN environ- ment. These results indicate the feasibility of rapidly developing high-performance UAV controllers by using adaptive control to augment a controller transferred from another UAV with similar control assignment structure.