Quadcopter control using the viscoelastic control law

Quadcopter is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with four rotors and generally, they are placed in a square formation with equal distance from the centre of mass. The thrust produced by each rotor is directed upward and the UAV is controlled by varying the magnitude and direction of the rotor speed with the help of DC motors. In this paper, a novel controller is proposed that imitate the behavior of four-element viscoelastic material. Some unmodelled disturbances was fed to the system to check the controller performance. The FE controller performance was compared with the classical PID controller. As in real world performances quadcopters are used in the presence of various sensors and other measuring devices, the time delay introduced by these instruments becomes very important for the stability of the system. Hence both the controllers were subjected to some designed time delay so that they can be compared in real-world scenario. The simulation of the above was carried out with the help of Simulink platform and from the simulation it was found that the FE controller is fast, accurate and precise in performance compared to the PID controller.