System Identification and Flight Control of an Unmanned Quadrotor

This chapter describes the system identification and flight control optimization of an unmanned quadrotor. The process includes hardware setup, flight testing, flight data collection and processing, system identification, model validation, controller optimization and validation. In this chapter, system identification is used to extract the dynamic model of the quadrotor. System identification uses cost‐function optimization to extract a linear model based on input and output data collected from the system. The chapter discusses quadrotor control, leading up to the linearized statespace model. It elaborates the kinematic and dynamic analysis and the model structure determination process. The software package COntrol Designer's Unified Interface (CONDUIT) is a tool developed by US Army AFDD for flight controller design, analysis, and optimization. This software has been successfully used in many flight control design applications, such as the AH‐64D, UH‐60A, and the RASCAL helicopter. CONDUIT reaches the optimum solution using a multi‐phase multi‐objective feasible sequential quadratic programming algorithm.