A benchmark for orientation control of a multirotor in a three degrees-of-freedom rotation structure

A fully equipped quadrotor is attached to a structure that allows free rotation without translation. Additionally, a set of MATLAB-Simulink® tools execute the flight controller programming and manage the real-time transmission of commands and flight states for the remote pilot. For this test bench a simulator is offered. It faithfully reproduces the behaviour of the real system in order to propose a benchmark on Control Engineering. This aims to control the quadrotor orientation described using the Euler angles. Thus the three control actions that attack the propulsion system must be generated taking into account the rotation speeds and angles that are estimated by the navigation system and the angle set points. During the performance tests, a modifiable supply voltage replaces the battery charge level and a control action emulates the height control, resulting in different operating points of the system as in a real flight. The simulator allows free setup of closed and open loop experiments for model identification tasks or analysing the control performance for different inputs and operating points. The final objective is to incorporate a control law that improves the behaviour given as a reference for a certain experiment. After a simulation, an evaluation function quantifies the differences in tracking error and control action between the current control and the reference control for each degree of freedom. The main challenge is a narrow control bandwidth to govern a complex three-variable system. © 2021 Universitat Politecnica de Valencia. All rights reserved.