Improving quadrotor trajectory tracking by compensating for aerodynamic effects

In this work, we demonstrate that the position tracking performance of a quadrotor may be significantly improved for forward and vertical flight by incorporating simple lumped parameter models for induced drag and thrust, respectively, into the quadrotor dynamics and modifying the controller to compensate for these terms. We further show that the parameters for these models may be easily and accurately identified offline from forward and vertical flight data. We demonstrate that the simple drag compensating controller can reduce the position error in the direction of forward flight in steady state by 75%, and that the controller using a more accurate thrust model, dubbed the “refined” thrust model, can improve the position error by 72% in the vertical direction.