Open AccessThe article considers an automatic quadcopter routing task. The quadcopter is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which has four engines. Currently, such already widely used vehicles are controlled, mainly, from the operator’s control panel. A relevant task is to develop a quadcopter control system that enables an autonomous flight. The aim of this paper is to study the possibility for solving this problem using an algorithm of the stabilization and trajectory control.
A mathematical model of the quadrocopter is the fairly complicated non-linear system, which can be obtained by using the Matlab Simulink and Universal Mechanism software systems simultaneously. Comparison of the simulation results in two software packages, i.e. Matlab wherein the nonlinear system of equations is modeled and UM wherein the flight path and other parameters are calculated according to transmitted forces and moments may prove correctness of the model used.
Synthesis of controllers for the orientation and stabilization subsystem and trajectory control subsystem, is performed on traditional principles, in particular using the PID controllers and method based on Lyapunov functions known in the literature as "backstepping." The most appropriate controls are selected by comparing the simulation results. Responses to the stepped impacts and to tracking the given paths have been simulated. It has been found that the flight path of a quadcopter almost coincides with designated routing, changes of coordinates for the quadcopter mass center of two controllers under comparison are almost the same, but a deviation range of the angular position for the controller backstepping is much smaller than that of for the PID controller.