Development Of A Quadrotor Control Platform With Expandability

Nowadays,the quadrotor has a wide application in both military and civil fields benefiting from its simple mechanical structure,ability of vertical takeoff and landing.Based on an ARM7 micro-processor,a complete development process of the quadrotor control platform is presented in this paper.This platform is characterized by expandability,low cost,supporting multi-control modes and ability to control both in indoor and outdoor environment.First of all,based on the summary of previous design experience and relevant literature,this paper has finished the hardware design of the platform,which includes the micro-processor,several sensors used to gather the real-time state of the quadrotor and other peripherals.Secondly,the dynamic model of the quadrotor is developed.Then,this paper designs the PID controller for the attitude and position control of the quadrotor.These theories provide the foundation for the software designing in the embedded controller.After that,simulation has been carried out to verify the effectiveness of the control algorithm.Besides,in the process of developing inertial navigation algorithm,due to the heavy noise,single sensor could hardly provide accurate state estimation to the controller.In order to solve this problem,multisensory data fusion algorithms are proposed in this research to precisely estimate the attitude and position of the quadrotor.Furthermore,outdoor flight test is carried out to prove that,with this control platform,the quadrotor is capable of navigating through user-defined way-points.On the basis of this control platform,Matlab and Vicon motion capture system,a hardware in the loop testbed is built.The feasibility of this testbed is tested.