Development and Validation of a LQR-Based Quadcopter Control Dynamics Simulation Model

The growing applications involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are requiring more advanced control algorithms to improve rotary-wing UAVs’ performance. To preliminarily tune such advanced controllers, an experimental approach could take a long time and also be dangerous for the vehicle and the onboard hardware components. In this paper, a simulation model of a quadcopter is developed and validated by the comparison of simulation results and experimental data collected during flight tests. For this purpose, an open-source flight controller for quadcopter UAVs is developed and a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) controller is implemented as the control strategy. The input physical quantities are experimentally measured; hence, the LQR controller parameters are tuned on the simulation model. The same tuning is proposed on the developed flight controller with satisfactory results. Finally, flight data and simulation results are compared showing a reliable approximation of the experimental data by the model. Because numerous state-of-the-art simulation models are available, but accurately validated ones are not easy to find, the main purpose of this work is to provide a reliable tool to evaluate the performance for this UAV configuration.