Volume 11 - Issue 2
Design of a quadrocopter with PID-controlled fail-safe algorithm
- Oleg V. Baranov
St. Petersburg State University, Peterhof, St. Petersburg 198504 Russia
o.baranov@spbu.ru
- Nikolay V. Smirnov
St. Petersburg State University, Peterhof, St. Petersburg 198504 Russia
n.v.smirnov@spbu.ru
- Tatyana E. Smirnova
St. Petersburg State University, Peterhof, St. Petersburg 198504 Russia
t.smirnova@spbu.ru
- Yefim V. Zholobov
St. Petersburg State University, Peterhof, St. Petersburg 198504 Russia
st062550@student.spbu.ru
Keywords: quadrocopter, UAV, fail-safe, control
Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are used in various fields of human activity. Unfortunately, they
often fall into various emergency situations. In special cases (expensive equipment on board the
copter, important information, etc.) it is important to provide a fail-safe landing. In this article, we
consider two problems. First of all, we propose an approach of choosing a hardware configuration of
a quadrocopter, which provide a possibility to solve emergency landing problems. The main target
performance characteristics for such a device are substantiated. The calculation methodology takes
into account the choice of commercially available components with the required characteristics. To
realize this approach, the eCalc software was used. The second problem considered in this article is
a control problem of automatic emergency landing with only two of four engines working. For this
purpose, we propose a mathematical model describing the quadrocopter movement in emergency
situations. This model use a PID controller to control the working engines. Numerical experiment is
carried out to prove the efficiency of this approach. For implementation the MATLAB package was
used.