Quadrotor Flight Controller Design Using Classical Tools

Abstract

A principal aspect of quadrocopter in-flight operation is to maintain the required attitude of the craft’s frame, which is done either automatically in the so-called supervised flight mode or manually during man-operated flight mode. This paper deals with the problem of flight controller (logical) structure and algorithm design dedicated for the man-operated flight mode. The role of the controller is to stabilise the rotational speeds of the Tait-Bryan angles. This work aims to extend the sustainable performance operating range of a proportional-integral-derivative output feedback compensator (PID) based flight controller by exploiting the concepts of feedforward inverse actuator model and the re-definition of input space in order to handle the non-linearity of the system under control. The proposed solution is verified numerically and implemented in the form of a discrete-time domain algorithm, obtained by emulation, using a physical quadrocopter model.