Abstract of the Project Thesis

Quadrotor helicopters or quadcopters are an emerging rotorcraft concept

for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms due to the simplicity of their
construction and maintenance, their ability to hover, and their vertical takeoff and
landing (VTOL) capability. Due to the requirements of autonomous flight under
different flight conditions without a pilot onboard, control of UAV flight is much
more challenging compared with manned aerial vehicles since all operations have
to be carried out by the automated flight control, navigation and guidance
algorithms embedded on the onboard flight microcomputer/microcontroller or with
limited interference by a ground pilot if needed.
The objective of this project is to design and realize a robust control
method that is effective, simple to implement for real-time applications that
perform reference attitude and position tracking and also handle the external
disturbances occurring due to wind, and other disturbances when the quadcopter is
flown outdoors. A novel method of designing a Proportional-Integral-Derivative
(PID) controller with optimal disturbance rejection for quadcopter pitch channel
and roll channel is proposed.
A Quanser Qball-X4 quadrotor equipped with necessary inertial navigation
sensors and an onboard computer is used as a platform to validate our controller
design. The proposed PID controller is compared with the Qball-X4s existing PID
controller that is based on Linear-Quadratic-Regulator (LQR) through simulating
the closed-loop system and experimentally testing it on an available quadcopter
test bed. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.