Abstract:
In recent years, there has been growing commercial and military interest in small-scale multi-rotor unmanned aerial systems (UAS), from commercial package delivery, to performing search and rescue missions, to providing surveillance and reconnaissance support. The Vehicle Management and Control (VMC) Technical Area under the U.S. Army Aviation Development Directorate (ADD) at Moffett Field, California has strong experience and expertise in applying advanced flight control and obstacle field navigation (OFN) technologies to full-size manned and unmanned rotorcraft. The Quadrotor Guidance, Navigation, and Control project was established to develop and apply these advanced technologies to a small-scale commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) multi-rotor UAS to support emerging Department of Defense and industry needs. This paper provides an overview of the project, from the organizational aspect, to the development of the hardware and software infrastructure, to the application of the aforementioned advanced technologies to a 3D Robotics IRIS+ quadrotor research vehicle. Example results for each core technology component (system identification, flight control design and optimization, hardware-in-the-loop simulation, flight testing and validation) are presented to demonstrate its successful application to the IRIS+. Current work in developing scoring metrics and scaled ADS-33 Mission Task Elements (MTEs) for evaluating the performance of control designs based on aggressiveness, tracking, and robustness are discussed. Recent development of a quadrotor-specific Control Equivalent Turbulence Input (CETI) turbulence model and its application in the design of a performance-based disturbance rejection flight control system are also summarized.