Quadrotor Flight Envelope Protection while Following High-Speed Trajectories: a Reference Governor Approach

Aerodynamic effects can become dangerous when a drone follows a path at high speed even in the absence of wind. This paper studies a method to ensure that a quadrotor drone follows a 2D high-speed trajectory in the presence of safety constraints. A reference governor control is implemented to make the drone follow its trajectory while respecting a set of constraints that includes polynomial constraints when aerodynamic effects are modelled. The method is based on a recent state space augmentation technique that converts polynomial constraints into linear constraints. For the first time, this state augmentation technique is applied to flight envelope protection for tracking high-speed trajectories using a reference governor to alter the reference trajectory to protect the flight envelope. Simulation results for the proposed algorithms are reported when a drone follows a circular trajectory with increasing speed.