Quadrotor’s modeling and control system design based on PID control

Abstract

The quadrotor is an unmanned aerial vehicle with a compact construction and good maneuverability. In recent years, this type of aircraft has been widely developed and has a wide range of military and civil applications. Due to the dynamic characteristics of strongly coupled, non-linear, and multi-variable quadrotor UAVs, modeling the dynamics of UAVs and designing control systems has been the focus of quadrotor research. This paper takes the quadrotor UAV as the research object. Firstly, for the basic structure of the quadrotor UAV, the aircraft-body coordinate system and the earth-surface coordinate system of the UAV flight are established, and the transformation matrix of the two coordinate systems is given. Based on a series of reasonable assumptions, the non-linear system is modeled and a simulation platform is built using Simulink. Secondly, based on the constructed non-linear dynamics equations of the system, a cascade PID-based attitude controller and position controller of the UAV are designed. Finally, the designed control system was simulated in Matlab for straight-line flight and target-position flight, and obstacles were applied to the vehicle to verify the effectiveness of the control system. The final results show that the designed control system can make the quadrotor UAV stable in vertical and horizontal motion and can successfully travel to the target position. This paper provides a control method and framework for a PID controller-based quadrotor UAV control system.