Disturbance observer-based visual servoing for multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper presents a disturbance observer based input saturated visual servoing law for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The controller regulates the 4D relative pose, i. e., 3D translational and yaw motion, between the vehicle and a planar horizontal visual target in an environment with external disturbances. A feedforward control is used to compensate the lumped disturbance consisting of both system uncertainties and external disturbances. The feedback control part is based on a nested saturation control, which is used to bound the orientation of the UAV and therefore helps to keep the visual target in the camera’s field of view. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate controller performance.