Historical and Current Landscapes of Autonomous Quadrotor Control: An Early-Career Researchers’ Guide

The rising demand for autonomous quadrotor flights across diverse applications has led to the introduction of novel control strategies, resulting in several comparative analyses and comprehensive reviews. However, existing reviews lack a comparative analysis of experimental results from published papers, resulting in verbosity. Additionally, publications featuring comparative studies often demonstrate biased comparisons by either selecting suboptimal methodologies or fine-tuning their own methods to gain an advantageous position. This review analyzes the experimental results of leading publications to identify current trends and gaps in quadrotor tracking control research. Furthermore, the analysis, accomplished through historical insights, data-driven analyses, and performance-based comparisons of published studies, distinguishes itself by objectively identifying leading controllers that have achieved outstanding performance and actual deployment across diverse applications. Crafted with the aim of assisting early-career researchers and students in gaining a comprehensive understanding, the review’s ultimate goal is to empower them to make meaningful contributions toward advancing quadrotor control technology. Lastly, this study identifies three gaps in result presentation, impeding effective comparison and decelerating progress. Currently, advanced control methodologies empower quadrotors to achieve a remarkable flight precision of 1 cm and attain flight speeds of up to 30 m/s.