Design and development of a UAV Experimental Platform

Abstract

This paper deals with the design, construction, and instrumentation of a UAV experimental platform. It is formed by a mechanism and a UAV hexacopter. The mechanism allows the movement around of non-inertial frame of the vehicle while restricting the movement around of inertial frame. The UAV hexacopter is fixed to the mechanism and contains an IMU sensor to measure the angular position of the vehicle. The data acquisition, processing and compute of the control signals is developed on board the vehicle through a NI myRIO®. By considering the dynamical behavior of the UAV hexacopter, it can be divided in rotational and translational motion. The stabilization of the rotational dynamics is addressed in this work, where two control loops around the Euler angles roll and pitch are implemented and tested in the experimental platform. The development of the instrumentation and the construction of the experimental platform are presented to explain how the system measures the angular position around the non-inertial frame of the UAV. The main contribution of this work is the design of the experimental platform. The effectiveness and practicality to stabilize a UAV hexacopter are shown through experimental results.