Attitude stabilization of a Quad-rotor UAV based on rotor speed sensing with accelerometer data estimation via Kalman filtering

This paper presents a real-time attitude and altitude stabilization of a Quad-rotor UAV that uses Kalman Filter (KF) to estimate the accelerometer measurements from the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to improve the flight in hovering mode to indoor and outdoor applications. It also presents a control strategy based on speed sensing in each brushless DC motors through a reflective sensor, resulting a robust stabilization on the horizontal plane of the vehicle. A Lyapunov candidate function is presented to demonstrate the stability of the overall system (Quad-rotor). Finally, the experimental results of speed sensing control and estimation of the angular position via Kalman Filter (KF) for stabilizing of the Quad-rotor UAV are presented.