Modelling and control of a quadrotor

Abstract

The aim of this project is to model and control a quadrotor. The project starts introducing the quadrotor and its parts. After that, the project provides the modelling of the dynamics of the quadrotor using the Lagrange-Euler and the Newton-Euler's approaches. The next part focuses in the design of a controller for the main actions of the quadrotor using the equations of the dynamics. The chosen controller is a PD, for its simplicity and acceptable performance. With the controller designed, the aircraft was tested to verify the simplifications made on the controller. To that, first some simulations using Simulink (Matlab) were done. After that, further experiments were done with the real quadrotor. The good results of the simulations justified the validity of the simplifications and the controller. Furthermore, although it was necessary to add other PD to the previous one, forming a cascaded PID controller, the results of the real experiments were acceptable. Finally, the project contains the explanation and application of a method to optimize the parameters of the controller, and to find the real values of parameters of the model dificult to measure directly, as the inertia.