Control system design and experiments of a quadrotor

The quadrotor aircraft is a special type of rotorcraft with simple structure and vertical taking off and landing (VTOL) capability. Due to lift restrictions small quadrotor usually cannot be installed with high performance attitude measurement unit to acquire accurate attitude information, the lack of which makes its attitude control difficult. This paper presents the control system design and experimental validation of a small quadrotor with low-cost and low-weight inertial sensor to realize stable hovering including the modeling of the quadrotor, attitude estimation, attitude stabilization and platform design. Complementary filter is adopted to estimate the quadrotor attitude by fusing the information obtained from the low-cost gyroscopes and the accelerometer. Attitude stabilization control is achieved by three classic PID controllers. Flight experiments are presented in the end to show the performances of the attitude estimation and stabilization of the control system.