Design and Implementation of a Development Platform for Indoor Quadrotor Flight Control

Research and development of flight control of quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained popularity during the past few years due to their deployment flexibility and wide range of applications: agriculture, entertainment, cinematography, package delivery, search and rescue, etc. This thesis project follows up this interest aiming to build a real-time development platform for experimentation and test of indoor flight controllers in the Networked Embedded Robotics in Delft laboratory. For this goal, we employ a Matrice 100 quadrotor from DJI alongside its ROS C++ Software Development Kit (SDK), develop a system identification routine to model its autopilot, vertical and horizontal displacement, and based on the attained results, we design and implement a control topology for real-time position control of the UAV inside the laboratory by means of a Model Predictive Controller (MPC) and a Linear-Quadratic Regulator. Finally, we enunciate and discuss potential applications in which this development platform can be used.Mechanical Engineering | Systems and Contro