Experimental validation of robust full-pose tracking for fully and overactuated multirotors

Abstract

This paper presents a robust cascaded control architecture for fully actuated and overactuated multirotors. The proposed approachcombines Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion and structured H∞ control, and extends their application beyond underac-tuated platforms considered in previous work. It reduces dependence on an accurate multirotor model by shifting the modelingeffort toward the actuator dynamics, thereby improving closed-loop robustness in the presence of uncertainties. Moreover, attitudeand position tracking are achieved through a geometric weighted least-squares control allocation scheme formulated as a quadraticoptimization problem in the guidance loop, enabling full-pose tracking. The proposed architecture effectively addresses key prac-tical challenges such as avoiding infeasible pose references, enhancing robustness to external disturbances, and complying withthe multirotor physical limitations. Numerical simulations conducted on an overactuated hexacopter demonstrate the effectivenessof the method across diverse real-world mission scenarios. In addition, experimental results obtained on a fully actuated hexa-copter confirm the capability of the proposed architecture to reject disturbances and independently control the different multirotordynamics.