Quadrotor attitude control through a network with (m-k)-firm policy

This paper deals with the design and analysis of an (m-k)-firm control policy applied to a network controlled mechatronic system, namely a quadrotor. The quadrotor is controlled by an embedded microprocessor through a network. The paper focuses on the problem of packet drops in the network. An (m-k)-firm policy requires that at any time, at least m packets among any k consecutive ones must be received. This is applied to the LQ control of the quadrotor. The paper details the choice of k and m and shows that with this policy the system is robust to network packet loss. The system and the network are simulated with Matlab/Simulink and TrueTime.