Adaptive closed-loop speed control of BLDC motors with applications to multi-rotor aerial vehicles

This paper introduces the adaptive bias and adaptive gain (ABAG) algorithm for closed-loop electronic speed control (ESC) of the brushless direct current (BLDC) motors typically used to spin the propellers in multi-rotor aerial robots. The ABAG algorithm is adaptive and robust in the sense that it does not require the knowledge of any mechanical/electrical parameter of the motor/propeller group and that neither a pre-calibration nor the knowledge of the feedforward/nominal input is needed. The ABAG algorithm is amenable to an extremely low complexity implementation. We experimentally prove that it can run in 27.5 μs on a 8 MHz microcontroller with no floating point unit and limited arithmetic capabilities allowing only 8-bit additions, subtractions and multiplications. Besides the controller implementation we present a self-contained open source software architecture that handles the entire speed control process, including clock synchronization, and over-current and blockage safeties. The excellent performance and robustness of ABAG are shown by experimental tests and aerial physical interaction experiments.