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Formation and flight control of affordable quad-rotor unmanned air vehicles

University of British Columbia

For several decades, Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) have generated considerable interest in the control and commercial community due to their advantages over manned systems. Cutting edge techniques in senors, communications and robust control can now make affordable commercial missions involving Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) a reality. The aim of this work was to control an autonomous UAV using H[sub ∞] loop shaping and MPC control laws and further demonstrate formation control with three such identical UAVs. The UAV used in our project is the four-rotor Dragonflyer III helicopter. To achieve the project objectives, a nonlinear model of the Dragonflyer III and further a Quasi-LPV model were developed. An H[sub ∞] loop shaping control law was designed for stabilization and speed loops. For the trajectory control, two controllers, an H[sub ∞] and an MPC, were designed and compared. This project then was extended to control 3 quad-rotor UAVs in equilateral triangle flying formation, objective for which, there layers, Path Planner, Trajectory Generator and Formation Controller, were introduced and implemented in Matlab and Simulink., ready for placing the hardware in the loop. The performance of the proposed methods was evaluated for several circumstances with satisfactory results. To validate the low level H[sub ∞] control laws and demonstrate flying, an experimental system including a flying mill, a personal computer and DSP dSPACE board, a programmed microprocessor and a radio transmitter was built for testing. Comparing to previous UAV works, a quad-rotor helicopter is first chosen as the UAV dynamics in our project. The 2 DOF H[sub ∞] and combined MPC/H[sub ∞] flight controller are firstly achieved and animated to control such high nonlinear system. A new implementation of formation flying control is proposed and simulated in MATLAB and SIMULINK. A self designed experimental setup is also built for identification and control testing purpose.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-10-30

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/14459

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace