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I am making an automated quadcopter: no radio transmitter-receiver and the quacopter flies on its own with pre-programmed orders.

All most all quadcopter implement PID on throttle/yaw/pitch/roll as these 4 axes are directly on an remote controller. However this is a bit inconvenient for an automated one without a controller. As an automated quadcopter without user input, velocities along x/y/z axis are of more concern, because:

  1. keeping balance(yaw/pitch/roll=0) doesn't mean keeping still, as first, there will be some error in manufacture so it might still have some acceleration. Second, even there's no acceleration, it can have speed, causing it to drift in space. And as there's no user input, it can not fix the drift on it's own. Besides, if there's wind, it might got blow away, even it thinks it's balanced.

  2. Orders are mostly given in "go to position(x,y)" or "keeping velocity x, fly above position(x,y) and start camera video capture." or so. These orders can't be translated into yaw/pitch/roll directly.

So basically I have two ideas:

  1. Implement PID on yaw/pitch/roll/height and use a second PID loop to control velocity. The second PID loop take desired velocity and current velocity as input and output desired yaw/pitch/roll for first loop.

  2. Implement PID directly on velocity. The pid loop take desired velocity and current velocity(by integrating acceleration from accelerometer) as input and output PWM width for 4 motors.

Have anyone tried idea 2? Will this work?

Jonas
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Light
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1 Answers1

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PID maps a measured value to a controlled value. If you can sense velocity reliably, you can use it to drive a PID. However, integrating an accelerometer won't give you a reliable enough velocity. Any sensing errors will compound through the integration and could grow your velocity estimate unbounded.

The R/P/Y PIDs on a quadcopter don't control the PWM to the motors directly, they control the roll, pitch, and yaw rates, then convert the rates to thrusts, then convert the thrust components for the various motors, then convert the thrusts into PWMs. See ArduPilor MotorMatrix code for hints.

You can put PIDs anywhere you like in the process between whatever is choosing the velocity and the motors, but you likely need some intermediate control/state variables between 'velocity' and 'PWM[1-4]' to balance things and have coordinated flight.

Dave X
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    Thanks for your reply. After some struggle, I finally made a working PID system to loop control position, velocity, rate and finally thrust. I used a very large Kalman filter to fuse all data from accelero/gyro, sonar, pressure and gps, thanks to raspberry pi 2's computational capability over an atmega. – Light Apr 21 '16 at 08:41