Computer-Aided Design, Multibody Dynamic Modeling, and Motion Control Analysis of a Quadcopter System for Delivery Applications

This paper elaborates on the modeling and control of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for delivery purposes, thereby integrating computer-aided design, multibody dynamic modeling, and motion control analysis in a unified framework. The UAV system designed in this study and utilized for item delivery has a quadcopter structure composed of four arms connected to a central trunk. In this investigation, the proposed design of the delivery drone is systematically modeled employing the multibody approach, while SIMSCAPE MULTIBODY is the software used for performing the dynamic analysis and for devising the final design of the control system. To this end, starting from the CAD model designed using SOLIDWORKS, the control system of the quadcopter is developed by performing dynamic simulations in the MATLAB/SIMULINK environment. Additionally, another fundamental contribution of this paper is the analytical derivation of the nonlinear set of algebraic constraint equations peculiar to the present multibody system, which characterizes the kinematics of the delivery drone and describes the relative angular velocity imposed between two rigid bodies as nonholonomic constraints. Furthermore, as discussed in detail in this paper, the choice of the propulsion system and the design of the individual components heavily depends on the structural and functional needs of the UAV under study. On the other hand, the control system devised in this work is based on cascaded Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers, which are suitable for achieving different maneuvers that are fundamental for the motion control of the delivery drone. Therefore, the final performance of the UAV system is a consequence of the regulation of the feedback parameters that characterize the PID controllers. In this respect, the paper presents the refining of the parameters characterizing the PID controllers by using both an internal MATLAB tool, which automatically tunes the controller gains of single-input single-output systems, and by observing the resulting transient behavior of the UAV system, which is obtained through extensive dynamical simulations. The set of numerical results found in this investigation demonstrates the high performance of the dynamical behavior of the UAV system designed in this work.