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Quadrotor Flight Controller Design Using Classical Tools

  • Control Theory and Applications
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International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Control Systems and Informatics, Faculty of Electrical and Control Engineering, Gdańsk University of Technology, 80-233, Gdańsk, Poland

    Tomasz Zubowicz

  2. Department Control Engineering, Faculty of Electrical and Control Engineering, Gdańsk University of Technology, 80-233, Gdańsk, Poland

    Krzysztof Arminski & Arkadiusz Kusalewicz

Authors
  1. Tomasz Zubowicz
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  2. Krzysztof Arminski
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  3. Arkadiusz Kusalewicz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tomasz Zubowicz.

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Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Recommended by Associate Editor Seungkeun Kim under the direction of Editor Chan Gook Park. The research work was done under grant Polish MNiSW 8902/E-359/M/2017: Young Researcher Support Program. The authors wish to express their thanks for support.

Tomasz Zubowicz received his M.Sc. Eng. degree in Control Engineering from the Faculty of Electrical and Control Engineering at the Gdańsk University of Technology in 2008. He received his Ph.D. Eng. (with honours) in the field of Control Engineering from the same faculty in 2019. In 2012, he became a permanent staff member at the Department of Control Systems Engineering at Gdansk University of Technology and a member of the IFAC T.C. 5.4 Large Scale Complex Systems. His current research interests concern the fuzzy control, model predictive control, biologically inspired control structures, monitoring, control and security of critical infrastructure systems.

Krzysztof Armiński received his M.Sc. Eng. degree in Control Engineering in 2009 from the Faculty Electrical and Control Engineering Department at the Gdańsk University of Technology. He received his Ph.D. Eng. (with honours) in the field of control engineering from the same faculty in 2014. Currently, he holds position of an assistant professor at the Department of Control Engineering, Gdansk University of Technology. His research interests include mathematical modelling and interval state estimation.

Arkadiusz Kusalewicz received his B.Sc. degree in Control Engineering in 2017 from Electrical and Control Engineering Department at Gdańsk University of Technology.

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Zubowicz, T., Arminski, K. & Kusalewicz, A. Quadrotor Flight Controller Design Using Classical Tools. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 18, 730–738 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-018-0710-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-018-0710-9

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