Design and construction of a self-levelling tricopter using gain scheduling and PID controllers

Abstract

This paper proposes a control system for a tilt-rotor tricopter. This vehicle has 3 sets of propellers with one mounted on a servo to control the yaw movement. This results in asymmetry which requires a more complex control system to achieve stability. This paper proposes a gain scheduling PID control system designed for and implemented in such a tricopter. Flight stability was achieved by using decoupled control systems for positive and negative offsets of pitch and roll, and a separate controller for yaw. We present the step response of these controllers and show that the proposed system is able to stabilise the tricopter in flight