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Experimental study on cascaded attitude angle control of a multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle with the simple internal model control method

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Abstract

This paper proposes a cascaded control structure and a method of practical application for attitude control of a multi-rotor Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The cascade control, which has tighter control capability than a single-loop control, is rarely used in attitude control of a multi-rotor UAV due to the input-output relation, which is no longer simply a set-point to Euler angle response transfer function of a single-loop PID control, but there are multiply measured signals and interactive control loops that increase the complexity of evaluation in conventional way of design. However, it is proposed in this research a method that can optimize a cascade control with a primary and secondary loops and a PID controller for each loop. An investigation of currently available PID-tuning methods lead to selection of the Simple internal model control (SIMC) method, which is based on the Internal model control (IMC) and direct-synthesis method. Through the analysis and experiments, this research proposes a systematic procedure to implement a cascaded attitude controller, which includes the flight test, system identification and SIMC-based PID-tuning. The proposed method was validated successfully from multiple applications where the application to roll axis lead to a PID-PID cascade control, but the application to yaw axis lead to that of PID-PI.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Aviation Maintenance, Dongwon Institute of Science and Technology, Yangsan, 50578, Korea

    Jun-Beom Song

  2. Department of Aerospace Engineering, Pusan National University, Busan, 609-735, Korea

    Young-Seop Byun, Jin-Seok Jeong, Jeong Kim & Beom-Soo Kang

Authors
  1. Jun-Beom Song
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  2. Young-Seop Byun
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  3. Jin-Seok Jeong
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  4. Jeong Kim
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  5. Beom-Soo Kang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Beom-Soo Kang.

Additional information

Recommended by Associate Editor Deok Jin Lee

Jun-Beom Song received his Ph.D. degree in aerospace engineering from Pusan National University, Korea in 2015, and joined Dongwon Institute of Science and Technology, Korea, as a Professor at the same year. His research interests include guidance and control of an unmanned aircraft, and application of embedded systems. Since he is currently working in the Department of Aviation Maintenance, his interests also include the maintenance of manned or unmanned aircrafts, and how to train maintenance engineers with international standards of FAA and ICAO.

Beom-Soo Kang received his M.S. degree in aeronautical engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Korea in 1983. He received Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from University of California at Berkeley, California at 1990. He joined Pusan National University as a Professor since 1993. His research interests include unmanned aerial vehicle system, computer-aided engineering of manufacturing process by finite element method for structural analysis, materials processing and metal forming.

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Song, JB., Byun, YS., Jeong, JS. et al. Experimental study on cascaded attitude angle control of a multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle with the simple internal model control method. J Mech Sci Technol 30, 5167–5182 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-016-1035-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-016-1035-3

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