Embedded control system for a four‐rotor UAV

Abstract

Abstract This paper describes the design of an embedded control system for a four‐rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to perform hover flights. A dynamic model of the vehicle is presented using an Euler–Lagrange approach. A control strategy based on nested saturation is proposed. An embedded control system architecture is described for autonomous hover flight. The main components of the system are a microcontroller, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), a global positioning system (GPS) and infrared sensors. The Euler angles are computed using a data fusion algorithm. The experimental results show that the on‐board control system performs satisfactorily for autonomous hovering indoors. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.