A Controller Based on PVTOL Control Signals for Guiding a Quadrotor in 3D Navigation Tasks

MILTON SANTOS; MÁRIO SARCINELLI-FILHO; ALEXANDRE S. BRANDAO; RICARDO CARELLI

Dallas

Congreso; 2018 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS); 2018

IEEE

In this work a novel control architecture is proposedto guide an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), specificallya quadrotor, in 3D flights correspondent to positioning andpath-following tasks. Such an architecture is based on thefusion of three control signals generated by three simplercontrollers (associated to PVTOL tasks). Considering the wholenavigation as a task composed by the control of the vehicleorientation with respect to its target (associated to a Z-PVTOLcontroller), the control of its forward movement (associatedto a XZ-PVTOL controller), and the correction of any sidedisplacement (associated to a YZ-PVTOL controller, similar tothe XZ-PVTOL controller), a first approach was to executesuch partial maneuvers one each time, using the same threePVTOL controllers here adopted, switching from one to otherof these controllers according to a supervisor. The new approachadopted in this paper corresponds to consider that the threePVTOL controllers act simultaneously, and generating thefinal control signal to be sent to the UAV through fusing theindividual control signals generated by the PVTOL controllers,thus smoothly coupling three simpler controllers. Experimentalresults are presented to validate the proposed approach, andthe performance of the controller thus designed is compared tothe one correspondent to the switching approach.