This paper outlines progress towards realising practical quad-rotor robot helicopters and, in particular, the Australian National University’s ‘X-4 Flyer’ platform. Two challenges facing the X-4 are generating sufficient thrust and managing unstable dynamic behaviour. We address these issues with a rotor design technique for maximising thrust and the application of a novel rotor mast configurat...

It is challenging to stabilise an unmanned quad-rotor aerial vehicle when a dynamic change in its model parameters or failure of its actuator occurs. In this paper, a quad-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is controlled based on model reference adaptive control (MRAC) and a linear quadratic regulator (LQR). The kinematics and dynamics of the quad-rotor are calculated, and Lyapunov’s direct st...

To date, most quad-rotor aerial robots have been based on flying toys. Although such systems can be used as prototypes, they are not sufficiently robust to serve as experimental robotics platforms. We have developed the X-4 Flyer, a quad-rotor robot using custom-built chassis and avionics with off-the-shelf motors and batteries, to be a highly reliable experimental platform. The vehicle uses tu...

Quad rotor is a renowned underactuated Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with widespread military and civilian applications. Despite its simple structure, the vehicle suffers from inherent instability. Therefore, control designers always face formidable challenge in stabilization and control goal. In this paper fuzzy membership functions of the quad rotor’s fuzzy controllers are optimized using nat...

Title of thesis: EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF A QUAD-ROTOR BIPLANE MICRO AIR VEHICLE Christopher Michael Bogdanowicz Master of Science, 2015 Thesis directed by: Dr. Inderjit Chopra Department of Aerospace Engineering Micro air vehicles are expected to perform demanding missions requiring efficient operation in both hover and forward flight. This thesis discusses the development of a hybrid air...

This paper recalls a non-linear constructive method, based on controlling cascades of conic-systems as it applies to the control of quad-rotor aircraft. Such a method relied on the physical model of the system to construct highperformance, modest sampling period (Ts = .02 s) and lowcomplexity digital-controllers. The control of fixed-wing aircraft, however is not nearly a straight forward task ...

In this paper a nonlinear model of an underactuated quad rotor aerial robot is derived, based on Newton-Euler formalism, and backstepping based PID control strategy is implemented for the derived model. Model derivation comprises determining equations of motion of the quad rotor in three dimensions and seeking to approximate actuation forces through modeling of aerodynamic coefficients and elec...

As we know, sliding mode control methodology is one of the robust control technique to handle systems with model uncertainties, parameter variations and external disturbances. In this paper, a robust altitude control scheme is proposed for a nonlinear quad-rotor aircraft system based on sliding mode controller with an integral action to eliminate the steady-state error effect. The proposed slid...

This paper illustrates the application of an adaptive flight control architecture to a scale quad-rotor. For autonomous VTOL (Vertical Takeoff and Landing) flight, it is common to separate the control problem into an inner fast loop that controls attitude and an outer slow loop that controls the trajectory of the VTOL. In this paper we augment a conventional PD controller conceived mainly for h...