Experimental Framework for Controller Design of a Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Using Multi-Camera System

Abstract

This paper describes the experimental framework for the control system design and validation of a rotorcraft unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Our approach follows the general procedure of nonlinear modeling, linear controller design, nonlinear simulation and flight test but uses an indoor-installed multi-camera system, which can provide full 6-degree of freedom (DOF) navigation information with high accuracy, to overcome the limitation of an outdoor flight experiment. In addition, a 3-DOF flying mill is used for the performance validation of the attitude control, which considers the characteristics of the multi-rotor type rotorcraft UAV. Our framework is applied to the design and mathematical modeling of the control system for a quad-rotor UAV, which was selected as the test-bed vehicle, and the controller design using the classical proportional-integral-derivative control method is explained. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach can be viewed as a successful tool in developing the controller of new rotorcraft UAVs with reduced cost and time.