QuadRocket: An Aerial Robotic Testbed for Adaptive Thrust-Vector Control of Rocket-Like Vehicles
2026-07-02 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors developed QuadRocket, a cheap and safe prototype that uses a quadrotor drone with a rocket-shaped body to test new ways of controlling rocket-like vehicles. They modeled the system as a single body with a force applied along its main axis and created a special controller to follow flight paths accurately, even with unknown disturbances. Their design separates the vehicle's spinning motion from the thrust direction, simplifying control. They tested their control methods in simulations and real indoor flights, showing good tracking and disturbance handling. This makes QuadRocket a useful tool for experimenting with thrust-vector control in flying robots.
quadrotorthrust-vector controladaptive backstepping controllertrajectory trackingdynamic-surface controlaxisymmetric rigid bodyuniversal jointnon minimum-phase behaviorattitude controlmotion capture
Authors
Pedro Santos, Joel Reis, Paulo Oliveira, Carlos Silvestre
Abstract
This paper presents QuadRocket, a quadrotor-based rocket prototype that provides a low-cost, low-risk platform for validating advanced thrust-vector control strategies for launch vehicle-type systems. The prototype consists of a cylindrical main body mounted on top of a quadrotor through a universal joint, forming a flying inverted pendulum with non-negligible inertia. For control design, the coupled system is modeled as a single axisymmetric rigid body actuated by a vectored force applied along its longitudinal axis. A reduced-attitude representation on the two sphere is adopted to explicitly exploit the vehicle's axial symmetry and to decouple yaw from the thrust-vector direction. On this model, we derive an adaptive backstepping controller that achieves almost global trajectory tracking in the presence of unknown constant disturbances, while a control-point transformation mitigates non minimum-phase behavior. The quadrotor is then treated as a thrust vector actuator, and a dynamic-surface-based attitude controller is designed to track the desired thrust-vector, accounting for actuation dynamics and avoiding explicit differentiation of virtual control signals. The complete architecture is evaluated in simulation and validated experimentally in an indoor motion-capture arena. Results demonstrate accurate trajectory tracking, effective disturbance compensation, and confirm the suitability of the QuadRocket as a versatile testbed for thrust-vector-controlled robotic vehicles.