Design and nonlinear control of an indoor quadrotor flying robot

Micro Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) systems represent a useful class of flying robots because of their strong capabilities for small-area monitoring and building exploration. In this paper, we describe a small quadrotor flying robot for the use of indoor autonomous navigation and exploration. Three-level hardware architecture is developed and a fusion of different sensors is implemented, which enables automatic hovering, control from Remote-Controller, localization and navigation in indoor environment. Since the flying robot is a nonlinear underactuated system, an Integral- Backstepping control algorithm is proposed to realize robust attitude and position control. Both simulation and experiment results are presented to validate the performance of the proposed control algorithm.