Development of an Experimental Robotic Test Bed for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Control

This paper focuses on the control policy/law development for a nonlinear model of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). It identifies and implements three different control laws on the quadrotor UAV model viz-a-vis PID, Lyapunov and nonlinear backstepping controllers. Satisfactory results were obtained in attitude tracking simulation experiments for the three controllers. A first take at what constitutes good system response was made when response characteristics like rise time, settling time and peak overshoot were used. The Lyapunov controller outperformed both the standard PID in terms of no overshoot and also the nonlinear backstepping controller in terms of overshoot but performs poorly when rise time and steady state response time is considered. However considering energy conservation with torque as the operative variable, the nonlinear backstepping controller outperformed both the PID and Lyapunov controllers. This has made nonlinear controller selection and development the adopted control scheme for the long term goals of this project.

Keywords:

Robotic systems , UAV , stabilization , tracking , full set of off the shelve UAV system with inbuilt multisensory camera , nonlinear control