Some results on closed-loop identification of quadcopters

In recent years, the quadcopter has become a popular platform both in research activities and in industrial development. Its success is due to its increased performance and capabilities, where modeling and control synthesis play essential roles. These techniques have been used for stabilizing the qu...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Ho, Du
Format: Others
Language:English
Published: Linköpings universitet, Reglerteknik 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-152701
http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:isbn:9789176851661
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Summary:In recent years, the quadcopter has become a popular platform both in research activities and in industrial development. Its success is due to its increased performance and capabilities, where modeling and control synthesis play essential roles. These techniques have been used for stabilizing the quadcopter in different flight conditions such as hovering and climbing. The performance of the control system depends on parameters of the quadcopter which are often unknown and need to be estimated. The common approach to determine such parameters is to rely on accurate measurements from external sources, i.e., a motion capture system. In this work, only measurements from low-cost onboard sensors are used. This approach and the fact that the measurements are collected in closed-loop present additional challenges. First, a general overview of the quadcopter is given and a detailed dynamic model is presented, taking into account intricate aerodynamic phenomena. By projecting this model onto the vertical axis, a nonlinear vertical submodel of the quadcopter is obtained. The Instrumental Variable (IV) method is used to estimate the parameters of the submodel using real data. The result shows that adding an extra term in the thrust equation is essential. In a second contribution, a sensor-to-sensor estimation problem is studied, where only measurements from an onboard Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) are used. The roll submodel is derived by linearizing the general model of the quadcopter along its main frame. A comparison is carried out based on simulated and experimental data. It shows that the IV method provides accurate estimates of the parameters of the roll submodel whereas some other common approaches are not able to do this. In a sensor-to-sensor modeling approach, it is sometimes not obvious which signals to select as input and output. In this case, several common methods give different results when estimating the forward and inverse models. However, it is shown that the IV method will give identical results when estimating the forward and inverse models of a single-input single-output (SISO) system using finite data. Furthermore, this result is illustrated experimentally when the goal is to determine the center of gravity of a quadcopter. === <p>This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 642153.</p>