Attitude and position tracking of autonomous 6 d.o.f. vehicles with mono-directonal actuators

In this work we address the position and attitude control problems for autonomous vehicles in 6 Degrees of Freedom (DOFs), with monodirectional actuators and whose mathematical description includes uncertainties and disturbances. Quaternion-based guidance rules are proposed for attitude and position control at the kinematic level. The actuation system consists of seven monodirectional jets, suitably located and oriented along the vehicle, and it is the first known example of a regular 6 DOFs simplex of vectors in the control space. To set the thrusts exerted by the jets, a strategy based on a dynamical version of the simplex-based control approach is suggested. The proposed simplex based approach is endowed by a suitable mechanism that prevents the unbounded growth of the thrusts. The performance of the proposed scheme is verified by means of computer simulations.