Attitude control and trajectory tracking of an autonomous miniature aerial vehicle

This paper introduces a Miniature Aerial Vehicle (MAV) which is Autonomous in outdoor environment. Main contributions of this research are both new trajectory tracking and attitude control scheme in real flight mode. This MAV is based on a traditional quadrotor. For stabilization of the quadrotor´s attitude a PID controller is utilized. The proposed controller is designed such that to be able to attenuate effect of external wind disturbance and guarantee stability in this condition. For autonomous trajectory tracking, it is necessary to have a fixed altitude. Also an ARM cortex M4 microcontroller performs processing activities. Then, a trajectory is determined by a GPS in Mission Planner software for the outdoor environment. For real time communication between robot and ground station, HMTR module is used. Flight data is saved in Memory SD card and converts to MATLAB code for real time implementation. Experimental results of the proposed controller on the Autonomous Quadrotor in real conditions show the effectiveness of our approach.