Design, construction and fly-by-wireless control of an autonomous Quadrotor helicopter

This paper describes the design, development and analysis of an autonomous Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that is controlled using fly-by-wireless technology. A communication protocol between the UAV and a Ground Control Station (GCS) is established to continuously send information from the on-board sensors to the GCS. There, a controller computes the control signal in real-time and sends it back to the UAV to act upon the actuators. An Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and a sonar are used as sensors to determine the attitude angles and the height of the UAV, respectively. A state-feedback controller is designed by pole placement. Considering the delays of the wireless network, a Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional is used to determine if the stability of the system is affected by the delay. Some results are presented from initial flight experiments in which attitude angles and altitude are stabilized.