UC Santa Cruz

Effective attitude control is a key component of any Unmanned Aerial System (UAS).Typical PID based control operates on the euler angle representation of attitude. This representation is susceptible to the issue of gimbal lock – a phenomenon in which the rotation axes of a three-axis system align, causing a loss of one degree of freedom and potential loss of orientation information. Moreover, PID based attitude control of UAS’s suffer from the drawbacks associated with typical linear controllers. Namely, an ability to reliably control the system when not near the point of equilibrium. This thesis will cover an attitude control implementation directly on the Special Orthogonal group, SO(3), where neither of the aforementioned issues exist. This controller is implemented in both simulation and on hardware.