Characterization and enhancement of micro brushless DC motor response

Commercially available speed controllers, motors, and propellers typically comprise the powertrains of many micro aerial robotic systems, such as quadrotor vehicles. As on board state sensing and processing improves, actuation bandwidth is becoming a significant bottleneck that limits the performance of the entire closed loop system. The performance of the commercial products can be greatly enhanced through the implementation of classical control methods directly at the powertrain level. In this paper, reduced order open loop models for three representative commercially available powertrains were estimated and were compared with closed loop equivalents. Further performance improvement is realized by the addition of a static inverse to mitigate the steady state structured uncertainty of the system.