Modeling and simulation of fully autonomous quadrotors
Christian Micklisch, Nathan Hilliard, Hala ElAarag · Communications and Networking Symposium · 2018
A fully autonomous quadrotor is an aerial drone that utilizes four propellers to achieve stable flight through the use of obstacle avoidance, attitude control, and altitude control algorithms. In this research we created a simulator for a group of coordinated autonomous quadrotors that employs parallel computing and dynamic behavior to formulate a real time scalable and adaptable system. In addition to simulating laws of physics, we have also simulated several sensors that the quadrotors can utilize to interact with the environment. The simulator allows for the comparison of the performance of different configurations and control of quadrotor systems in various environments. We implemented several algorithms for obstacle avoidance, attitude and altitude control and flocking techniques. For space limitations, we only present the mathematical model and simulation results of three attitude controllers namely, Kemper, Hoffman and Dikmen.