An Agile Single Board Quadrotor Providing ”Eye in the Sky” Capabilities for Marine Environments

This paper presents a robust model independent control method for the stabilization of a four-rotor rotorcraft, which is popularly known as the quadrotor helicopter. In addition, a detailed dynamic model is presented for the formulation of the proposed control law and a prototype platform heavily utilizing printed circuit board technology is proposed for experimentation. This paper focuses on compensating for unknown disturbances (e.g., wind gusts) that naturally occur in a marine environment. In order to employ eye in the sky capabilities in a marine environment, a quadrotor helicopter must hand these disturbances without jeopardizing the stability of the vehicle. To this end, the control law is derived from the Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) technology, which is reported in the literature to be resistant to external disturbances. The robustness of the proposed controller is demonstrated through numerical simulation of the vehicle’s vertical flight. External disturbances in the simulation experiment is considered as a sudden vertical gust of wind acting on the vehicle. In order to quantify the robustness of the controller relative to conventional control technologies, a PD controller under identical flight conditions provides a reference benchmark. The comparative performance of the two controllers shows that the proposed control algorithm significantly outperforms the PD algorithm under the simulated disturbance conditions.