A model of quadrotor UAV power consumption and its performance across a range of flight conditions
Alexander B. Faustino · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2019
This thesis presents a parametric model of quadrotor power consumption and characterizes the performance of this model in hardware experiments. Like other existing power models that have been used both for quadrotors and general rotorcraft, it can be expressed as the sum of four terms---induced, parasitic, profile, and climb power---that depend on estimates of the aerodynamic forces and moments acting on the quadrotor. The model's accuracy was measured across a wide range of flight conditions. The results of an ablation study to show the relative contribution of each term are presented, concluding that the contribution strongly depends on the ground velocity of the quadrotor. Both the dataset and code are freely available as a benchmark to facilitate future work in this area.