Controle de estabilidade de um quadricóptero

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have more degrees of freedom and flexibility compared to manned vehicles. Their applications range from delivery to vigilance, pesticide application in crops and search and rescue in hazardous conditions to humans. This project aims at the design and development an electric UAV, quadcopter type, with attitude control and capable of communicating with a computer, in order to receive commands and send back telemetry data, and also with a radio-transmitter, in order to receive commands from a human pilot. A test bench was developed to safely and easily test control strategies, removing some degrees of freedom, but keeping the vehicle’s autonomous operation. Three techniques were used to reduce system induced noise and increase the precision of the estate estimation. The first one, at hardware level, is a damping platform. The second and the third techniques, at software level, are based on low-pass filters, to attenuate noise, and Kalman filter, for sensor fusion and state estimation. The three axes attitude control was performed by parallel PID controllers. Tests were divided in three steps: one degree of freedom test-bench tests, two degree of freedom test-bench tests and indoor and outdoor flying tests. This proposed system was validated through various tests, achieving hover stabilization in all cases with up to five degrees of oscillation.