Model independent control of a quadrotor with tiltable rotors: IEEE/ION PLANS 2016, April 11–14, Savannah, Georgia, United States of America

In order to enable autonomous flights and to increase the field of application of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) a new quadrotor with tiltable rotors is developed. This highly non-linear system requires complex algorithms to be controlled. To gain an efficient and robust control algorithm is a key problem concerning autonomous flights. In this article a simple but robust control approach based on control allocation is presented. This approach is used in order to keep the computational costs and the level of needed system information as low as possible. By tuning the controller properly with an algorithm from the field of bionics and applying a standard downhill optimization after that the robustness and performance are increased. Simulation results show the performance of the controller in different optimization stages and display the controller's robustness in the final stage.