Identification and control of a quadrotor from experimental data

The paper presents experimental results related to attitude control of a quadrotor rotating about a single axis. The Embedded Model Control (EMC) methodology is used for control design. Indeed, this methodology can be very effective in applications involving relevant disturbances, modeling errors and unknown nonlinearities, since it allows a cancellation of all these sources of uncertainty. EMC control design is performed from a detailed quadrotor model, where the actuator dynamics is identified from experimental data. The designed EMC controller is compared with a standard proportionalintegral-derivative (PID) controller in several tests, carried out on a laboratory testbench.