Control system design and experiments of a quadrotor

The quadrotor aircraft is a special type of rotorcraft with simple structure and vertical taking off and landing (VTOL) capability. Due to lift restrictions small quadrotor usually cannot be installed with high performance attitude measurement unit to acquire accurate attitude information, the lack of which makes its attitude control difficult. This paper presents the control system design and experimental validation of a small quadrotor with low-cost and low-weight inertial sensor to realize stable hovering including the modeling of the quadrotor, attitude estimation, attitude stabilization and platform design. Complementary filter is adopted to estimate the quadrotor attitude by fusing the information obtained from the low-cost gyroscopes and the accelerometer. Attitude stabilization control is achieved by three classic PID controllers. Flight experiments are presented in the end to show the performances of the attitude estimation and stabilization of the control system.

[1]  T. Madani,et al.  Backstepping Sliding Mode Control Applied to a Miniature Quadrotor Flying Robot , 2006, IECON 2006 - 32nd Annual Conference on IEEE Industrial Electronics.

[2]  A. Tayebi,et al.  Attitude stabilization of a four-rotor aerial robot , 2004, 2004 43rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37601).

[3]  Emanuel Stingu,et al.  Design and implementation of a structured flight controller for a 6DoF quadrotor using quaternions , 2009, 2009 17th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation.

[4]  P. Gaspar,et al.  Control of an experimental mini quad-rotor UAV , 2008, 2008 16th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation.

[5]  Rogelio Lozano,et al.  Real-time stabilization and tracking of a four rotor mini-rotorcraft , 2003 .

[6]  A. Tayebi,et al.  Step by step robust nonlinear PI for attitude stabilisation of a four-rotor mini-aircraft , 2008, 2008 16th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation.

[7]  P. McKerrow.  Modelling the Draganflyer four-rotor helicopter , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[8]  Abdelaziz Benallegue,et al.  Backstepping Control for a Quadrotor Helicopter , 2006, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[9]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Backstepping and Sliding-mode Techniques Applied to an Indoor Micro Quadrotor , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[10]  Steven Lake Waslander,et al.  Multi-agent quadrotor testbed control design: integral sliding mode vs. reinforcement learning , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[11]  T. Madani,et al.  Control of a Quadrotor Mini-Helicopter via Full State Backstepping Technique , 2006, Proceedings of the 45th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.