Control of Fully Actuated Aerial Vehicles: A Comparison of Model-based and Sensor-based Dynamic Inversion

2026-05-12

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of high-precision, decoupled control for fully actuated multirotors under model mismatch, external disturbances, and sensor degradation. On a fixed-tilt hexacopter platform, geometric nonlinear dynamic inversion (geometric NDI) and incremental dynamic inversion (INDI) are experimentally compared within a shared 500 Hz high-bandwidth outer-loop architecture. The work presents the first experimental demonstration that INDI achieves full pose tracking capability in translation–rotation decoupled systems. It further reveals a fundamental trade-off between model-based and sensor-based dynamic inversion strategies: INDI yields lower position tracking errors under parameter mismatches, wind disturbances, and sensor degradation, whereas geometric NDI exhibits superior attitude tracking performance when control frequency is reduced.

Abstract

Fully actuated multirotor platforms decouple translational force generation from vehicle attitude, enabling independent control of position and orientation and shifting performance limitations from attitude authority to actuator dynamics and control effectiveness. This paper compares a model-based nonlinear dynamic inversion controller (geometric NDI) with a sensor-based incremental dynamic inversion controller (INDI) on a fixed-tilt fully actuated hexarotor. Both controllers share an identical outer-loop structure and are both executed at 500 Hz; therefore, performance differences can be attributed primarily to the inversion strategy. Controller performance is evaluated in five experiments covering attitude step tracking under nominal conditions and under a 50% mismatch in the rotor force coefficient, hover disturbance rejection under an external lateral load, waypoint tracking in the presence of wind gust disturbances, reduced control frequency, and injected sensor degradation. The results show that INDI offers clear advantages under parameter mismatch, gust disturbances, and sensor degradation, and maintains lower position errors across the controller-frequency sweep. However, its advantages are not universal: geometric NDI yields better attitude tracking at reduced control frequencies. To the authors' best knowledge, this work presents the first experimental validation of a full pose tracking INDI controller with decoupled translational and rotational dynamics. These findings highlight the trade-off between measurement-based and model-based inversion for robust control and rapid deployment of fully actuated UAVs.

Problem

• fully actuated aerial vehicles
• dynamic inversion
• robust control
• parameter mismatch
• sensor degradation

Innovation

• Incremental Dynamic Inversion
• Fully Actuated UAV
• Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion
• Robust Control
• Decoupled Pose Tracking