Control and Optimization of a Variable-Pitch Quadrotor with Minimum Power Consumption

Shouzhao Sheng and Chenwu Sun
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Shouzhao Sheng: College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 29 YuDao St., Nanjing 210016, China
Chenwu Sun: College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 29 YuDao St., Nanjing 210016, China

Energies, 2016, vol. 9, issue 4, 1-18

Abstract: Recently, there has been a rapid growth of interest in quadrotors with electric variable-pitch propellers. The control and optimization of such propellers are important factors for improving the flight performance of the vehicles. Therefore, the steady-state identification method to estimate the parameters of the mathematical model of the electric variable-pitch propeller is developed. The steady-state control and optimization scheme with minimum power consumption and the adaptive compensation scheme for the variable-pitch propeller are then proposed, based on which the response performance of the lift force produced by the variable-pitch propeller can be greatly improved by using a cascade compensation scheme. Furthermore, the direct lift-based flight control strategy is presented, which can significantly contribute to the improvement of the flight performance, precisely because the roll, pitch, yaw and vertical channels of the variable-pitch quadrotor are approximately linearized and completely decoupled from each other in this case. The experimental results demonstrate that both the endurance performance and the positioning accuracy of the variable-pitch quadrotor are improved simultaneously by using the proposed method with minimum power consumption.

Keywords: minimum power consumption; steady-state optimization; steady-state identification; adaptive compensation; variable-pitch quadrotor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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