Prescribed-Time Trajectory Tracking Control for Quadrotor Without Velocity Measurement

This article proposes a prescribed-time control (PTC) scheme for the effective trajectory tracking of the quadrotor systems. First, a novel prescribed-time observer (PTO) is developed to address the unmeasured velocity problem, which is able to provide smooth velocity signals rather than directly differentiating the position information. Moreover, it also avoids the infinite observer gain in contrast to conventional PTC. Second, a PTC for quadrotor trajectory tracking is designed to ensure that the tracking errors converge to the equilibrium point within the settling time. Compared with the fixed-time and finite-time control methods, the convergence time of the PTC is independent of the initial states and parameters setting, featuring fast response time and high tracking accuracy. The rigorous theoretical analysis for both the nominal and perturbed systems confirm the prescribed-time stability. Ultimately, the proposed method is verified through comparative simulations and experiments.