Autonomous Control of Quadcopter UAV

Abstract

In the recent years UAV(Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) having quad-copter configuration have been receiving increasing attention amongst the global researchers due to its wide-range of applications such as surveillance in military, civilian and disaster management applications. Quad-copter is a multi-rotor aerial vehicle that is lifted and propelled by four rotating propellers or rotors typically run by brush-less DC motors providing required thrust. The altitude (or height) and attitude (roll, pitch and yaw angles) of the quad-copter can be controlled by manipulating voltages applied to these motors. The heart of the quad-copter is the controller board. In general, quad-copters available as hobby kits are operated manually wherein the flight-trajectory is controlled manually by providing thrust and angular movement commands from the hand-held RF transmitter and receiver, which sends command signals to quad-copter motor control board. However, this restricts the operations of the quad-copter only to within visible range of the human operator. In this thesis, we propose to investigate autonomous flight operations for the quad-copter through the quad-copter pixhawk control-system. Pixhawk is the flight controller R&D tool, which on one side can be used to control the quad-copter altitude and attitude, and on the other side provides facility for computer interface to receive flight commands and transfer necessary data. It is proposed to investigate autonomously obtain various flight trajectories e.g. hovering, linear, circular, rectangular, and some complex trajectories etc. Along-side, it is also proposed to develop a suitable hardware as a payload for certain application such as video imaging, weather data monitoring etc. In the present dissertation report, autonomous control of UAV for circular, triangular, line trajectories based on GPS (Global Position System) are executed. Quadcopter simulation on matlab with various type of disturbance variations and different height are performed. The analysis of actual hardware control system consist PID algorithm which is tuned for a specific set point of an altitude. In a future work, the control algorithm of gain scheduling can be taken up. Matlab model and actual testing data are compared with the practical / simulated results and are thoroughly summarized in the report.