System Identification Guidance for Multirotor Aircraft: Dynamic Scaling and Test Techniques

State-space system identification was performed to extract flight dynamic models for hovering flight of a 55 cm, 1.56 kg hexacopter unmanned aerial vehicle. Different input excitation techniques were tested to determine which maneuvers provided high-quality system identification results for small-scale multirotor vehicles. These input excitation techniques included automated frequency sweeps, varying in amplitude, and multisine sweeps. Coherence, Cramer–Rao bounds, and insensitivities were used as metrics for comparing the system identification results. A parametric variation of frequency sweep amplitudes were performed in all axes (roll, yaw, pitch, and heave) to provide guidance on frequency sweep amplitude for small-scale multirotor unmanned aerial systems. The dynamics of the 55 cm hexacopter were used to estimate the dynamics of a larger 127-cm hexacopter via Froude scaling based on hub-to-hub distance as the characteristic length. The scaled results were compared to an actual system identification model of a 127-cm hexacopter.