Quadrotor Control

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Overview

Quadrotor control concerns keeping these agile aerial robots stable while tracking trajectories, avoiding obstacles, and handling disturbances, changing payloads, or physical interaction. Common approaches include geometric and PID controllers, incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion, and model predictive control, often paired with control barrier functions for safety; learning methods such as reinforcement learning and learned dynamics are increasingly used for agile flight and adaptation. Applications range from racing and cluttered navigation to inspection, landing, formation flight, and transporting or manipulating payloads. A central challenge is achieving reliable sim-to-real transfer and safe performance under uncertain dynamics while meeting the tight computation and sensing limits of small onboard platforms.

Latest papers

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127 papers19 papers in the last four weeks, down 14% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Integrated Guidance and Control of a Mother-Child UAV-UGV System for Cooperative Missions

    Sep 17, 2026Aashish Sahu, R. Prasanth KumarAerial RoboticsMulti-Robot Coordination

    Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Telangana, India | Department of Artificial Intelligence, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Telangana, India

  2. Feasibility and Singularity in High-Order Safety-Critical Control for Quadrotor UAVs

    Sep 16, 2026Omayra Yago Nieto, Leonardo ColomboSafety-Critical ControlControl Barrier Functions

    Universidad Polit´ecnica de Madrid, Spain · Centre for Automation and Robotics (CSIC-UPM), Ctra. M300 Campo Real, Km 0,200, Arganda del Rey - 28500 Madrid, Spain

  3. CALOS: Control-Affine Lyapunov On-manifold Safety Layer for Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning for Quadrotors

    Sep 15, 2026Fabrizio Cesareo, Sebastiano Mengozzi, Nicola Mimmo +1RL ControlLyapunov-Based Control

    Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Information Engineering “Guglielmo Marconi” — DEI University of Bologna, Italy

  4. Escape-Aware Control Barrier Functions for Quadrotor Safety under Body-Rate Limits

    Sep 15, 2026Lei Shi, Haosong Wen, Qichao LiuSafety-Critical ControlControl Barrier Functions

    University of Wisconsin–Madison · Southeast University · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

  5. DuctAM: A Duct-Assisted Quadrotor-Based Aerial Manipulator Enabling High-Force Push-and-Pull Interactions

    Sep 14, 2026Yi Wang, Rui Jin, Xinhang Xu +4Aerial RoboticsQuadrotor Control

    School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 · NTU–VinUni Joint Research Laboratory for Embodied AI and Robotics, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, and VinUniversity, Hanoi, Vietnam

  6. Learning to Exploit Passive Dynamics for Energy-Efficient Target Hopping of a Spring-Legged Quadcopter

    Sep 14, 2026Ruigang Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhicheng Zhong +3RL ControlEnergy-Efficient Robot Locomotion

    Department of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics, Guangdong Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Shantou, 515063, Guangdong, China. · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, 3200003, Israel.

  7. Dynamics-Informed Reinforcement Learning for Agile and Energy-Efficient Locomotion of a Monopedal Hopping Quadcopter

    Sep 14, 2026Ruigang Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhicheng Zhong +3Energy-Efficient Robot LocomotionRobot Locomotion

    Department of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics, Guangdong Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Shantou, 515063, Guangdong, China. · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, 3200003, Israel.

  8. Differential Realizability of Static Control Allocation in Multirotors: An Impossibility under Nonredundant Full Actuation and a Pseudoinverse Obstruction under Redundant Actuation

    Sep 11, 2026Antonio Franchi, Mirko MizzoniQuadrotor Control

    Robotics and Mechatronics Department, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science (EEMCS) Faculty, University of Twente, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands · Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy

  9. Curriculum-Based Adversarial Heterogeneous Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Quad-Copter Landing in Maritime Settings

    Sep 11, 2026Allan Minh-Tam Nguyen, Sree Showrya Kotala, Stefan Banioi-Crijman +2Adversarial TrainingAerial Robotics

    Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University, Minderbroedersberg 4-6, 6211 LK Maastricht, Netherlands

  10. Battery-Aware Predictive Trajectory Planning and Control for Multirotors Under Disturbances

    Sep 10, 2026Krishna Bhavithavya KidambiTrajectory OptimizationModel Predictive Control

    department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at University of Dayton, Dayton, OH.

  11. Contact-Aware Incremental Model Predictive Control for an Underactuated Aerial Manipulator

    Sep 10, 2026Darwin Liu, Tamas Keviczky, Sihao SunNonlinear MPCForce-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

    Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Delft University of Technology

  12. Statistical Turbulence and High-Fidelity Disturbance Fields for Quadrotor Flight Control

    Sep 9, 2026Xun HuangQuadrotor ControlRobust RL

    State Key Laboratory of Turbulence and Complex Systems, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, People’s Republic of China

  13. AccelMPC: High-Rate, Low-Power FPGA-Accelerated Model Predictive Control for Tiny Drones

    Sep 8, 2026Andrea Grillo, Brian PlancherModel Predictive ControlQuadrotor Control

    Dartmouth College · École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

  14. Learning to Fly: Stable Vision-Guided UAV Servoing with Compact Target-Centric Cues and Reinforcement Learning

    Sep 7, 2026Saurbh Singh Jamwal, Nived ChebroluVision-Based Robot ControlAerial Robotics

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

  15. Conflict-Predictive Variable Horizons in Multi-Drone Distributed Model Predictive Control

    Sep 7, 2026Linda Mümken, Michael Schwung, Stefan Lier +1Model Predictive ControlCollision Avoidance

    Department of Automation Technology, South Westphalia University of Applied Sciences, 59494 Soest, Germany · Institute of Automation and Computer Control, Ruhr University Bochum, 44801 Bochum, Germany · Department of Logistics and Supply Chain Management, South Westphalia University of Applied Sciences, 59872 Meschede, Germany

  16. Interpreting Control Latents for System Identification via Conditional Flow Matching

    Aug 24, 2026Dingqi Zhang, Ruiqi Zhang, Mark W. MuellerSystem IdentificationRobot Dynamics Identification

    High Performance Robotics Lab, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, UC Berkeley

  17. Spinning Quadrotor: Hover Thrust Augmentation with Passive Lifting Surfaces

    Aug 24, 2026Aniketh Parkala, Harikumar KandathAerial RoboticsQuadrotor Control

    Robotics Research Center (RRC), IIIT Hyderabad, India

  18. Payload Swing Estimation and Damping Without Payload Parameters for Multirotor UAVs

    Aug 19, 2026K. Taki, K. UmemotoQuadrotor ControlRobot State Estimation

    Mechanical Design Engineering, Division of System and Infrastructure Engineering for Safe and Sustainable Society, Graduate School of Engineering, University of Fukui, 3-9-1 Bunkyo, Fukui, 910-8507, Fukui, Japan

  19. Readiness Barrier Functions: Forward-Invariant Control Authority for Overactuated Multirotor Allocation

    Aug 17, 2026Giuseppe SilanoControl Barrier FunctionsQuadrotor Control

    Ricerca sul Sistema Energetico, Milan, Italy, and Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic

  20. FAM-DQ: A Dual-Quadrotor-Based Fully Actuated Aerial Manipulator for High-Torque Interaction

    Aug 13, 2026Xuwei Yang, Ruoyu Ren, Ziqian GuoAerial RoboticsQuadrotor Control

  21. RADAR Perception for Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance onboard small-scale Quadrotor UAVs

    Aug 3, 2026Dnyandeep Mandaokar, Bernhard RinnerMillimeter-Wave RadarmmWave Radar Sensing

    Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems, University of Klagenfurt, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria

  22. Physics-Aware End-to-End Deep Reinforcement Learning for Quadcopter Control with Actuator Dynamics

    Jul 28, 2026Ya-Chia Shen, Woei-Leong ChanRL ControlQuadrotor Control

    Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University · Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, National Cheng Kung University

  23. Critical slowing down for predicting controller induced loss of control in quadrotors

    Jul 28, 2026Jasper J. van Beers, Prashant Solanki, Erik-Jan van Kampen +1Safety-Critical ControlEarly Warning Detection

    PhD Candidate, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology, 2629 HS Delft, The Netherlands · PostDoc, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology, 2629 HS Delft, The Netherlands · Associate professor, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology, 2629 HS Delft, The Netherlands

  24. BC-NMPC: Battery-Constrained NMPC with Propulsion Prediction and Replanning for High-Speed Flight

    Jul 26, 2026Parakh M. Gupta, Matej Mihulka, Matej Novosad +2Robot Trajectory TrackingNonlinear MPC

    Multi-robot Systems Group, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic

  25. Anticipatory Risk-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Safe Flight Through Dynamic Clutter

    Jul 26, 2026Yuchao Mei, Guohao Zhang, Luxia Ai +2Collision AvoidanceRisk-Sensitive RL

    National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Multi-spectral Information Processing, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China

  26. Disturbance-Aware Flight for Aerial Robots in Narrow Space

    Jul 20, 2026Lei Qiang, Tianyu He, Chenyang Sun +3Nonlinear MPCUAV Navigation

    School of Robotics and Automation, Nanjing University, Suzhou 215163, China

  27. AeroAct: Action-Centered World-Action Models for Language-Conditioned Quadrotor Flight

    Jul 16, 2026Xinhong Zhang, Qiyuan Zhu, Yubo Huang +8Robotic ControlAerial Robotics

    School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology · School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology · Independent researcher

  28. Conditional Invertible Neural Networks for Data-Driven UAV Control: A 2-D Proof of Concept

    Jul 15, 2026Christian Wittke, Stephan Myschik, Oliver NiggemannInvertible Neural NetworksQuadrotor Control

    Computer Science in Mechanical Engineering, Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, Germany. · Institute for Aeronautical Engineering, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Bavaria, Germany

  29. Flatness-Preserving Residual Learning for Real-Time Tight Quadrotor Formation Flight

    Jul 14, 2026Pei-An Hsieh, Fengjun Yang, Nikolai Matni +1Multi-Robot Formation ControlResidual Dynamics Learning

    1GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA

  30. High-level spatial Dubins airplane-based reference smoothing with low-level geometric tracking for quadrotor control

    Jul 13, 2026Mogens PlessenRobot Trajectory TrackingQuadrotor Control

    Findklein GmbH, Switzerland