Date of Award
2017
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE)
Department
Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering
First Advisor
Richard J. Vaccaro
Abstract
The research and application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has been a hot topic recently. A UAV is defined as an aircraft which is designed not to carry a human pilot or operated with remote electronic input by the flight controller. In this thesis, the design of a control system for a quadcopter named Rolling Spider Drone is conducted. The thesis work presents the design of two kinds of controllers that can control the drone to keep it balanced and track different kinds of input trajectories. The nonlinear mathematical model for the drone is derived by the Newton-Euler method. The rotational subsystem and translational subsystem are derived to describe the attitude and position motion of drone. Techniques from linear control theory are employed to linearize the highly coupled and nonlinear quadcopter plant around equilibrium points and apply the linear feedback controller to stabilize the system. The controller is a digital tracking system that deploys LQR for system stability design. Fixed gain and adaptive gain scheduled controllers are developed and compared with different LQR weights. Step references and reference trajectories involving significant variation for the yaw angle in the xy-plane and three-dimensional space are tracked in the simulation. The physical implementation and an output feedback controller are considered for future work.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Lyu, Haifeng, "Multivariable Control of a Rolling Spider Drone" (2017). Open Access Master's Theses. Paper 1130.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/theses/1130