A Generalized Thrust Estimation and Control Approach for Multirotors Micro Aerial Vehicles

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Santos, Davi, Saska, Martin, Nascimento, Tiago
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866910726525812736
author Santos, Davi
Saska, Martin
Nascimento, Tiago
author_facet Santos, Davi
Saska, Martin
Nascimento, Tiago
contents This paper addresses the problem of thrust estimation and control for the rotors of small-sized multirotors Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Accurate control of the thrust generated by each rotor during flight is one of the main challenges for robust control of quadrotors. The most common approach is to approximate the mapping of rotor speed to thrust with a simple quadratic model. This model is known to fail under non-hovering flight conditions, introducing errors into the control pipeline. One of the approaches to modeling the aerodynamics around the propellers is the Blade Element Momentum Theory (BEMT). Here, we propose a novel BEMT-based closed-loop thrust estimator and control to eliminate the laborious calibration step of finding several aerodynamic coefficients. We aim to reuse known values as a baseline and fit the thrust estimate to values closest to the real ones with a simple test bench experiment, resulting in a single scaling value. A feedforward PID thrust control was implemented for each rotor, and the methods were validated by outdoor experiments with two multirotor UAV platforms: 250mm and 500mm. A statistical analysis of the results showed that the thrust estimation and control provided better robustness under aerodynamically varying flight conditions compared to the quadratic model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_02874
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Generalized Thrust Estimation and Control Approach for Multirotors Micro Aerial Vehicles
Santos, Davi
Saska, Martin
Nascimento, Tiago
Robotics
This paper addresses the problem of thrust estimation and control for the rotors of small-sized multirotors Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Accurate control of the thrust generated by each rotor during flight is one of the main challenges for robust control of quadrotors. The most common approach is to approximate the mapping of rotor speed to thrust with a simple quadratic model. This model is known to fail under non-hovering flight conditions, introducing errors into the control pipeline. One of the approaches to modeling the aerodynamics around the propellers is the Blade Element Momentum Theory (BEMT). Here, we propose a novel BEMT-based closed-loop thrust estimator and control to eliminate the laborious calibration step of finding several aerodynamic coefficients. We aim to reuse known values as a baseline and fit the thrust estimate to values closest to the real ones with a simple test bench experiment, resulting in a single scaling value. A feedforward PID thrust control was implemented for each rotor, and the methods were validated by outdoor experiments with two multirotor UAV platforms: 250mm and 500mm. A statistical analysis of the results showed that the thrust estimation and control provided better robustness under aerodynamically varying flight conditions compared to the quadratic model.
title A Generalized Thrust Estimation and Control Approach for Multirotors Micro Aerial Vehicles
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02874