Design of Dynamic Inversion and Explicit Model Following Control Laws for Quadrotor Inner and Outer Loops

A quadrotor was assembled with commercial off the-shelf (COTS) components readily available on the market as a platform for future research at Penn State. As a first step in this research, a model of the quadrotor is identified from flight data. Given the largely decoupled dynamics at low speed, frequency sweeps in different channels are performed separately on the roll, pitch, yaw and heave axes. A frequency-domain approach is used to perform system identification. First, frequency responses of the aircraft output are extracted from frequency-sweep flight data. Next, state-space models are fit to the frequency response data. Overall the identified model matched flight data well in both the frequency and time domain. Dynamic Inversion (DI) and Explicit Model Following (EMF) with LQR disturbance rejection control laws are developed for both an inner attitude loop and outer velocity loop. The control laws were developed to meet similar requirements, and have similar performance and robustness.