Development of Quadrotor Control under Wind Disturbance

Abstract

This research studies simulation of quadrotor control for lifting and landing under wind disturbance. A quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is widely used for any aerial task such as in search and rescue applications where human presence is hazardous in critical time especially after natural disasters. In this regard, the quadrotor comes to be very beneficial in delivering packages due to its capability to hover at low altitude, while taking off and landing at proximity areas. However, one of the challenges is to control the quadrotor under extreme conditions with the presence of wind disturbances. Therefore, lateral control for the quadrotor during a challenging environment is addressed here. The main objective of this project is to design a wind model from actual flight data that experienced turbulence wind during take-off hovering and landing. Hence, a mathematical model of the quadrotor was constructed in MATLAB/Simulink. A wind estimator was designed using the black box technique to demonstrate the quadrotor flying in a windy environment. Then, the quadrotor with estimated wind model was simulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK. The performance of estimated wind model was analysed by comparing the simulation performance with the actual flight data in terms of control effort, transient response, and steadystate error. The simulations result shows that the quadrotor hovering during strong wind has steady-state error with 70% larger compared to quadrotor hover in moderate wind. This simulation results closely agreed to the actual flight data in which the strong wind produces steady state error at 67% higher than moderate wind. Thus, the contribution of this project is development of framework to estimate the wind using actual flight data.