Adaptive Internal Model Control for Disturbance Rejection in Quadrotor UAVs Using Quaternions
11th International Conference on Recent Advances in Air and Space Technologies, Conference Program, RAST 2026, İstanbul, Turkey, 13 - 15 May 2026, (Full Text)
- Publication Type: Conference Paper / Full Text
- Doi Number: 10.1109/rast69551.2026.11672501
- City: İstanbul
- Country: Turkey
- Keywords: adaptive control, disturbance rejection, internal model principle, Quadrotor UAV, quaternion attitude control
- Istanbul Gelisim University Affiliated: Yes
Abstract
This paper addresses attitude tracking and disturbance rejection problems for quadrotor UAVs subject to parametric uncertainties and multi-tone sinusoidal disturbances in a unit quaternion space. The external effects are expressed as a superposition of sinusoidal components whose frequency information is available, whereas the amplitude and phase parameters remain undetermined. The quadrotor kinematics and dynamics are formulated using unit quaternions to ensure a singularity-free representation. The main difficulty stems from the coexistence of inertia uncertainties and broadband periodic disturbances, which significantly complicates the closed-loop system behavior. To handle this challenge, an integrated control scheme combining adaptive parameter estimation and the internal model principle (IMP) is developed. The design is first established for the case of known disturbance frequencies and then extended to account for inertia uncertainties. Lyapunov-based analysis guarantees boundedness of all closed-loop trajectories and asymptotic convergence of the attitude tracking error. Numerical simulations on a representative quadrotor model demonstrate that the proposed controller achieves robust and accurate tracking performance despite parameter deviations and frequency-rich disturbances.