Mathematical Modelling and Attitude Control of Quadcopter based on Classical Controller

Abstract

The development of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircrafts has been increasing in recent years due to growing demands in various sectors for critical missions and time saving purpose. There are number of configurations exist for VTOL airframe such as single-main-rotor, tandem rotor, coaxial rotor, tri-rotor, quad-rotor and hexa-rotor. Among various configurations quad-rotor and hexa-rotor configurations have been chosen frequently for various applications through miniature aircrafts. The components and subsystems of such configurations have been widely available for easy integration and flight tests. In addition to that, classical control methods such as proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers have been widely employed for better control of such aircrafts with stable operation. Even though the control methods are available with high performance flight controller boards, the attainment of quicker attitude response and better stability will be a major problem during the flight testing phase for quadcopters and hexacopters. Therefore, instead of directly going into the development of quadcopters, there should be a need for simulating their responses with models of actual configuration. In this paper, a quadcopter dynamics for roll, pitch, and yaw have been modelled as mathematical equations and its response have been simulated in MATLAB using classical control tools. The results have shown that the modelled dynamics respond faster with better stability.