Development, Implementation, and Experimental Outdoor Evaluation of Quadcopter Controllers for Computationally Limited Embedded Systems
This work addresses the challenge of deploying quadcopter controllers in real-world outdoor environments with hardware constraints, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new testing scenarios.
The paper tackled the problem of implementing and testing quadcopter flight controllers on computationally limited embedded systems in outdoor conditions, resulting in experimental evaluation showing performance metrics like position tracking error and onboard computation time for controllers such as Explicit Model Predictive Control, Linear Quadratic Regulator, and Proportional Integral Derivative.
Quadcopters are increasingly used for applications ranging from hobby to industrial products and services. This paper serves as a tutorial on the design, simulation, implementation, and experimental outdoor testing of digital quadcopter flight controllers, including Explicit Model Predictive Control, Linear Quadratic Regulator, and Proportional Integral Derivative. A quadcopter was flown in an outdoor testing facility and made to track an inclined, circular path at different tangential velocities under ambient wind conditions. Controller performance was evaluated via multiple metrics, such as position tracking error, velocity tracking error, and onboard computation time. Challenges related to the use of computationally limited embedded hardware and flight in an outdoor environment are addressed with proposed solutions.