Intelligent Control Design for Standard Search Pattern of a Quadcopter Under Prevailing Wind Gust

Abstract

The majority of applications require Quadcopter to fly in the outdoor environment where the velocity and direction of the wind can influence its movement from one point to another point. This situation will pose a challenge of designing an automatic flight control system that controls the Quadcopter to overcome the effects of wind, this paper mainly concentrates on mathematical modeling of Quadcopter dynamics and the design of an Adaptive control strategy that will generate corresponding control commands to maintain the Quadcopter in its designated path/trajectory even in the presence of wind. The idea behind designing Adaptive control is to make the Quadcopter autonomous and to minimize the deviations from the designated path in comparison to conventional controllers like PID. In this paper, the path/trajectory which is to be fed to the Quadcopter is generated using two different approaches one is with the help of trigonometric functions and the other based on position profile. Two types of wind disturbances are mathematically modeled using standard wind gust function in the MATLAB environment. Comparative analysis of the performance of both the controllers is performed by inducing wind disturbance in the geometric axis as X-axis, Y-axis as well as XY-axis. A detailed description of outputs obtained while the Quadcopter following different trajectories by employing both the control strategies is provided.