Stabilization and Path Tracking of a Mini Quadrotor Helicopter: Experimental Results
Keywords:
Quadrotor helicopters are gaining notoriety as research platform of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), due to its mechanical simplicity and high maneuverability, as well as the ability to hover and perform vertical take-off and landing (VTOL). However, the development of control systems for such vehicles is not trivial. Quadrotors have a nonlinear and open-loop unstable behavior and they are constantly affected by aerodynamic disturbances and unmodeled dynamics. In this article a cascade PID control strategy designed for stabilization and path tracking of an unmanned quadrotor is presented. The dynamic motion equations are obtained by the Lagrange-Euler formalism. The proposed control structure consists of an outer loop for the translational movements, followed by an inner loop for the stabilization of the quadrotor’s attitude motions. The performance achieved with the proposed control strategy is checked by simulations and experimental results. The aircraft used is the Crazyflie 2.0 and the state estimation is accomplished through an extended Kalman filter, where information from the inertial measurement unit is fused with positional information from an ultra-wideband systemAbstract
Quadrotor helicopters are gaining notoriety as
research platform of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), due to its
mechanical simplicity and high maneuverability, as well as the
ability to hover and perform vertical take-off and landing
(VTOL). However, the development of control systems for such
vehicles is not trivial. Quadrotors have a nonlinear and open-loop
unstable behavior and they are constantly affected by
aerodynamic disturbances and unmodeled dynamics. In this
article a cascade PID control strategy designed for stabilization
and path tracking of an unmanned quadrotor is presented. The
dynamic motion equations are obtained by the Lagrange-Euler
formalism. The proposed control structure consists of an outer
loop for the translational movements, followed by an inner loop
for the stabilization of the quadrotor’s attitude motions. The
performance achieved with the proposed control strategy is
checked by simulations and experimental results. The aircraft
used is the Crazyflie 2.0 and the state estimation is accomplished
through an extended Kalman filter, where information from the
inertial measurement unit is fused with positional information
from an ultra-wideband system
