Experimental Validation of Sensitivity-Aware Trajectory Planning for a Quadrotor UAV Under Parametric Uncertainty

In this work, we provide an experimental vali- dation of the recent concepts of closed-loop state and input sensitivity in the context of robust flight control for a quadrotor (UAV) equipped with the popular PX41 controller. Our objective is to experimentally assess how the optimization of the reference trajectory w.r.t. these sensitivity metrics can improve the closed- loop system performance against model uncertainties commonly affecting the quadrotor systems. To accomplish this, we present a series of experiments designed to validate our optimization approach on two distinct trajectories, with the primary aim of assessing its precision in guiding the quadrotor through the center of a window at relatively high speeds. This approach provides some interesting insights for increasing the closed- loop robustness of the robot state and inputs against physical parametric uncertainties that may degrade the system’s perfor- mance.