Dynamic Modeling and LQR Control of a Single Coaxial Drone with 2DOF Thrust Vectoring Mechanism

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), particularly quadcopters, present unique challenges for autonomous control due to their underactuated dynamics: only four available control inputs must govern six degrees of freedom. This paper investigates a physics-aware, end-to-end deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach that acts directly on low-level body inputs, total thrust and body torques $(T, τ_x, τ_y, τ_z)$, and closes the loop through a high-fidelity Simulink environment. Our simulator integrates a 12-state rigid-body model (MATLAB Level-2 S-Function) with (i) an Action2RPM allocation based on the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse of a coefficient matrix derived from thrust and drag terms, and (ii) first-order actuator dynamics for each motor (time constant $T_m = 0.076$ s), including rotor gyroscopic coupling. A shaped reward balances goal-reaching and stability using an exponential position well, attitude penalties, and quadratic velocity costs. Four DRL algorithms, DDPG, TD3, PPO, and SAC, are evaluated in two stages: (S1) thrust-only hover and (S2) hover with pitch torque and a translated goal. Results show that SAC and TD3 achieve superior stability and exploration efficiency, while PPO is less sample-efficient. The study highlights the significance of modeling actuator lags and aerodynamic moments for stable low-level control and provides a reproducible benchmark for quadcopter DRL.

In sampled cascade linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC) of quadrotors, the extended-state observer typically receives the instantaneous command, although the delayed measurement reflects an earlier, rotor-filtered acceleration. This paper proposes actuator-aware (AA) observer inputs: altitude and attitude observers use limited virtual inputs filtered by an assumed rotor model and aligned with the measurement delay, and horizontal observers use acceleration reconstructed from measured attitude. Fixed gains are selected on the discrete-time model under sensitivity and step-response requirements and stationary covariance ceilings on each channel's control variance and increment and on the noise-induced inner-loop increment of the full cascade. In paired set-point trials, PID-Budget, AA-Budget and AA-HalfGain reach mean RMSEs of 65.5, 19.2 and 16.9mm; under a stricter common cascade ceiling, the AA designs reach 29.9 and 26.4mm versus 72.3mm for a PID that uses roughly double their rotor-command increment. PX4 software-in-the-loop runs reproduce these results. Behind EKF2, a noise model fitted to the estimation errors predicts the roll/pitch and yaw increments within 5% on held-out and out-of-sample runs and the total rotor-command increment within 14%. Redesigned for this stack under the same sensitivity and response specification and estimator-aware ceilings, AA-Budget-E reduces the set-point RMSE from 59.1mm (PID-E) to 44.0~mm with a lower rotor-command increment in every paired set-point and lemniscate run (mean S6 rotor-command-increment reductions relative to PID-E: 45% before and 15% after output quantization); AA-HalfGain-E beats PID-E only on the lemniscate. The evidence is simulation-based, and the ceilings are nominal tuning constraints.

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.