Integrated Optimal Control and Explicit Guidance for Quadcopters

This goal of the research study is to create a framework for autonomous control technology for unmanned aerial vehicles with real-time target-relative guidance capabilities. This study and results presented in this paper aims to develop guidance and control functions and their integration for applications. Control functions are developed in the context of the optimal control problem. Optimal control formulation leads to trivial and nontrivial cases for finding state and co-state vectors. Integrated optimal control and explicit guidance are utilized for a quadcopter traveling to a point of interest at an agricultural field. Ardupilot and Mission Planner are the platforms used to provide simulated gyroscope and accelerometer data, which are inputted into a simulation of the integrated control and guidance. The simulation compares classical PID control against optimal control with explicit guidance to show that the quadcopter accurately reaches its desired location at the desired velocities.