Improved Altitude Control Algorithm for Quadcopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicles continue to play important roles in several applications and the improvement of their control performance has been explored in a great number of studies. In this paper, we present an altitude control algorithm for quadcopters that consists of a combination of nonlinear and linear controllers. The smooth transition between the nonlinear and linear modes are guaranteed through controller gains that are obtained based on mathematical analysis. The proposed controller takes advantage and addresses some known shortcomings of the conventional proportional–integral–derivative control method. The algorithm is simple to implement, and we prove its stability through the Lyapunov theory. By prescribing certain flight conditions, we use numerical simulations to compare the control performance of our control method to that of a conventional proportional–derivative–integral approach. Furthermore, we use a DJI-F450 drone equipped with a laser ranging sensor as the experimental quadcopter platform to evaluate the performance of our new controller in real flight conditions. Numerical simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.