A robust but easily implementable remote control for quadrotors: Experimental acrobatic flight tests

Maison Clouatre (1) , Makhin Thitsa (1) , Michel Fliess (2, 3) , Cédric Join (4, 3)

1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mercer University
2 LIX - Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École polytechnique [Palaiseau]
3 AL.I.E.N. - ALgèbre pour Identification & Estimation Numériques
4 CRAN - Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy

Experimental flight tests are reported about quadrotors UAVs via a recent model-free control (MFC) strategy , which is easily implementable. We show that it is possible to achieve acrobatic rate control of the UAV, which is beyond the previous standard. The same remote controller is tested on two physical vehicles without any re-tuning. It produces in both cases low tracking error. We show that MFC is robust even when the quadrotor is highly damaged. A video footage can be found at: https://youtu.be/wtSLalA4szc

Keywords: model-free control; intelligent controller; robustness; quadrotor

Domains: Systems and Control [cs.SY]; Automatic Control Engineering; Automatic; Optimization and Control [math.OC]

Maison Clouatre, Makhin Thitsa, Michel Fliess, Cédric Join. A robust but easily implementable remote control for quadrotors: Experimental acrobatic flight tests. 9th International Conference on Advanced Technologies, ICAT'20, Aug 2020, Istanbul, Turkey. ⟨hal-02910179⟩