|
As the technique of drones continues to develop and getting more common, quadcopters have the ability to take-off vertically and hover, in return, its ability to monitor and scout, also becomes more prominent than those of the unmanned fixed-wing aircrafts; its application is also more versatile, and so, more people are getting into the development and application of rotorcrafts. Traditionally, the development of rotorcrafts would usually consume a lot of time and budgets, not to mention the risks of actual experimenting, therefore, improving efficiency became the main focus of development. This thesis will discuss about a procedure based on Model Based Design, which is a kind of design method focusing on improving the efficiency of developing sophisticated control systems, designing flight control systems for quadcopters, improving development efficiency, and eventually, designing an actual quadcopter.
The Pixhawk series flight control systems have become the first choice for developing autonomous aircraft in recent years, its open-sourced feature has also greatly increased the possibility implement it in multiple ways. This thesis will use Pixhawk 4 flight controller as an example, to derive a quadcopter’s kinematics and dynamics model by understanding its flight principle, and create a quadcopter model under Matlab Simulink, then verify the derived quadcopter model by simulations.
For actual testing, this thesis will use the Foxtech-Hover-1 quadcopter as an example, by utilizing the UAV Toolbox and transform the established controller into source codes, then implement them into the Pixhawk 4 flight controller, in order to verify if a quadcopter is able to fly steadily.
In the results of the experiments, it is certain that the method decreases a lot of time and budgets consumed; in the process of eliminating errors, it is easier to analyze the source of issue, compared to the traditional way of reviewing large quantities of source code, the efficiency has increased distinctly, also, it is possible to improve a specific component, while not affecting other components’ functionality. The test results will be of great help during a quadcopter’s initial design, and hopefully, it would also become the theoretical basis for actual application.
|