Mitigating Flight Performance Errors in UAVs through Hybrid MRAC controller

Abstract

This research explores modelling, design, and control of quadcopters, focusing on mitigating flight performance errors that compensate the performance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) performance. It also explores a mathematical model for simulation and a control of rotary-wing UAV systems. Moreover, it describes a design methodology for a micro-sized UAV in CAD software. Adaptive control techniques are then used to design four sub-controllers of UAVs named Altitude Control, Roll, Pitch, and Yaw. It is basically a remodeling of classical Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC) scheme, which is named Hybrid MRAC, ensuring a better rise time performance than classical MRAC. The controllers are then analyzed in the presence of disturbances to prove that adaptive controllers are more robust to external disturbances than non-adaptive ones. Lastly for state estimation, an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is applied to account for real-world sensor noises that further degrade the performance of UAV