Quadrotor: Design, Control and Vision Based Localization

Abstract Modelling and control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) is a challenging problem owing to the inherent non-linearity. They demand ideal control for generating precise motion. This work aims at designing and building a light-weight quadrotor with improved on-board computational power and a diverse set of applications. Computer Aided Design (CAD) has been used to estimate mass and inertia parameters of the system. We briefly describe the functionality of various hardware components used in the fabrication process. Our work also describes dynamics of the system and state-space formulation for the controller design. We discuss two control strategies and evaluate their performance: (i) a simple PID controller and (ii) a back- stepping controller. A Simulator is designed to easily verify the control strategies and evaluate their effectiveness. We also incorporated vision based localization using a simple monochrome camera output. In the end, we describe the future work and the possible applications of our system. All the simulation and the field test results are shown where and when they are necessary.