QuadRocket: An Aerial Robotic Testbed for Adaptive Thrust-Vector Control of Rocket-Like Vehicles

2026-07-02

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of a low-cost, low-risk validation platform for rocket thrust vector control. The authors propose QuadRocket—a quadrotor-based rocket prototype that forms an inverted pendulum system by mounting a cylindrical body on a gimbal. To decouple yaw from thrust vector direction, they employ an axisymmetric rigid-body model with a spherical simplification of attitude representation and apply a control-point transformation to mitigate non-minimum-phase characteristics. Building on this formulation, they integrate thrust vectoring and quadrotor actuator dynamics into an adaptive backstepping controller for robust, coordinated trajectory tracking under disturbances. Both high-fidelity simulations and indoor motion-capture experiments demonstrate that the system achieves high-precision tracking and strong disturbance rejection, validating QuadRocket as an effective and versatile testbed for thrust vector control research.

Abstract

This paper presents QuadRocket, a quadrotor-based rocket prototype that provides a low-cost, low-risk platform for validating advanced thrust-vector control strategies for launch vehicle-type systems. The prototype consists of a cylindrical main body mounted on top of a quadrotor through a universal joint, forming a flying inverted pendulum with non-negligible inertia. For control design, the coupled system is modeled as a single axisymmetric rigid body actuated by a vectored force applied along its longitudinal axis. A reduced-attitude representation on the two sphere is adopted to explicitly exploit the vehicle's axial symmetry and to decouple yaw from the thrust-vector direction. On this model, we derive an adaptive backstepping controller that achieves almost global trajectory tracking in the presence of unknown constant disturbances, while a control-point transformation mitigates non minimum-phase behavior. The quadrotor is then treated as a thrust vector actuator, and a dynamic-surface-based attitude controller is designed to track the desired thrust-vector, accounting for actuation dynamics and avoiding explicit differentiation of virtual control signals. The complete architecture is evaluated in simulation and validated experimentally in an indoor motion-capture arena. Results demonstrate accurate trajectory tracking, effective disturbance compensation, and confirm the suitability of the QuadRocket as a versatile testbed for thrust-vector-controlled robotic vehicles.

Problem

• thrust-vector control
• rocket-like vehicles
• aerial robotic testbed
• trajectory tracking
• adaptive control

Innovation

• thrust-vector control
• adaptive backstepping
• reduced-attitude representation
• non-minimum phase mitigation
• dynamic surface control