The Design And Implementation Of The Flight Control System Of Micro-4-rotor Aircraft

Micro/small unmanned multi-rotor aircraft is playing an increasingly important role in military,civil and technology fields. Multi-rotor aircraft has great advantages in size, weight andmaneuverability, also it can take-off and land vertically and hover in certain point. The design of theflight control system is the key of the autonomous flight. The flight performance highly depends onthe performance of the flight control system. Thus, the design of flight control system with small size,low weight, low power consumption and low cost has great theoretical and application value.In this paper, the M4R(micro-4-rotor) aircraft is severed as the research platform. The structureand operation principle of this M4R is presented, the mathematical model is established, and thecontrol strategy is introduced and proved by the simulation. According to the requirements in the loadability, cost, power comsumption and size, the hardware of the control system is designed. With themodual design principle, the flight control calculation unit, sensors module, power module, activatormodule, remote wirless control module, wirless data communication module and groundstation isimplemented. The original data of the sensors are analyzed by Allam viaration method. Two attitudereference systems are designed by using complementary filter and Kalman Fileter based on quaternion,respectively. They are verified by experimental tests. With the requirements of the M4R flight controlsystem, the software design flow is elaborated. The data communication protocol is made, and theflight data is transimitted via groundstation.To test the software design of the M4R attitude reference system and groundstation, relatedexperimental tests were made. A seiries of fly tests were carried out to verify the feasibility andrealiabilty of the software and hardware design of the flight control system and control strategy.The flight data and experimental results show that the hardware design of the flight controlsystem meets the requirements, and the software design architecture is reasonable. The attitudereference system can meet the accuracy demand of M4R. The groundstation has high flexibility andhas good real-time transimittion ablity, which allows it to be used in the real-time flight test situation.According to the fly tests, the control strategy used in this paper can meet the requirements of attitudeand position control stabiliy.