Control and energy management for quadrotor

The availability of sufficient energy reserves and the performance of the autopilot constitute serious limiting factors in order to guarantee the completion of missions by battery-powered quadrotor helicopters. In this context, this article proposes methods aimed at improving the mission-level functional reliability through enhanced system self-awareness and adaptive mission planning. The central idea is to use system prognosis to estimate the available energy along the mission. In view of the possibility of occurrence of faults, the controller adopted for the quadrotor is of cascade switching multi-model predictive type, based on a set of piecewise affine models for the helicopter´s displacement dynamics. The mission reconfiguration is carried out by casting it in the form of a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP). The proposed methods were evaluated by numerical simulation under a variety of realistic scenarios. The results were satisfactory in terms of mission reconfiguration while performing accurate reference tracking.