Development, implementation, and experimental outdoor evaluation of quadcopter controllers for computationally limited embedded systems

Quadcopters are increasingly used for applications ranging from hobby to industrial products and services. This paper serves as a tutorial on the design, simulation, implementation, experimental outdoor testing of digital quadcopter flight controllers, including Explicit Model Predictive Control, Linear Quadratic Regulator, Proportional Integral Derivative. A was flown in an facility made track inclined, circular path at different tangential velocities under ambient wind conditions. Controller performance evaluated via multiple metrics, such position tracking error, velocity onboard computation time. Challenges related use computationally limited embedded hardware environment addressed with proposed solutions.