Design and Model Predictive Control of a Mars Coaxial Quadrotor

Mars has been a prime candidate for planetary explo-ration of the solar system because of the science discoveries that support chances of future habitation on this planet. The Mars exploration landers and rovers have laid the foundation of our understanding of the planet's atmosphere and terrain. However, the rovers have presented limitations in terms of their pace, travers ability, and exploration capabilities from the ground and thus, one of the main field of interest for future robotic mission to Mars is to enhance the autonomy of this exploration vehicles. Martian caves and lava tubes like terrains, which consists of uneven ground, poor visibility and confined space, makes it impossible for wheel based rovers to navigate through these areas. In order to address these limitations and advance the exploration capability in a Martian terrain, this article presents the design and control of a novel coaxial quadrotor Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV). As it will be presented, the key contributions on the design and control architecture of the proposed Mars coaxial quadrotor, are introducing an alternative and more enhanced, from a control point of view concept, when compared in terms of autonomy to Ingenuity. Based on the presented design, the article will introduce the mathematical modelling and automatic control framework of the vehicle that will consist of a linearised model of a co-axial quadrotor and a corresponding Model Pre-dictive Controller (MPC) for the trajectory tracking. Among the many models, proposed for the aerial flight on Mars, a reliable control architecture lacks in the related state of the art. The MPC based closed loop responses of the proposed MAV will be verified in different conditions during the flight with additional disturbances, induced to replicate a real flight scenario. For the model validation purpose, the Mars coaxial quadrotor is sim-ulated inside a Martian environment with related atmospheric conditions in the Gazebo simulator, which will use the proposed MPC controller for following an a priory defined trajectory. In order to further validate the proposed control architecture and prove the efficacy of the suggested design, the introduced Mars coaxial quadrotor and the MPC scheme will be compared to a PID-type controller, similar to the Ingenuity helicopter's control architecture for the position and the heading.