Design and Simulation of Quadcopter for Planetary Expedition

Abstract

Quadcopters were also called as quadrotor helicopter, is popularly known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). Quadcopters have been widely used in much of the civilian and military applications over the past few years due to its compact size and high stability. Numerous studies are being conducted to investigate the potential for employing these devices for different operations, such as delivery of packages, construction work, hurricane hunting, 3D mapping, preserving wildlife, agricultural operations, search and rescue, etc. Since these devices are unmanned vehicles, the effectiveness of their navigation control system determines how well they operate. It is however difficult to design robust controller for such systems. This is due to the fact that quadcopters are highly sensitive to control inputs. The focus of this paper is to design body frame and simulation of a quadcopter for planetary expedition. It uses a linear proportional-derivative integral (PID) controller to control the quadcopter’s altitude, attitude, direction, and location in space. The created control system uses six degrees of freedom (3 linear and 3 angular motions) to control both rectangular x, y, and z positions as well as orientation. The body components of the quadcopter are designed using AutoCAD and imported to Simulink/Matlab for assembly and performance evaluation considering the external environment with varying wind speed on earth and mars. The results revealed that the designed quadcopter was reliable and capable of adapting for exclusive wind disturbances.