Speed controller design for the actuators of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle

The quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been a hot area for the research of unmanned aerial vehicle. As an important part of the quadrotor UAV systems, the actuators directly determine the quadrotor´s flying performance. A new speed controller design is proposed for the actuators of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle in this paper. A method of motor speed measurement is proposed. A hardware architecture is developed to measure the speed and to obtain the dynamic model of the brushless motor via nonlinear regression analysis. Then fuzzy logic method is combined with a PID control algorithm to design the speed controller for brushless motors which are employed as the quadrotor UAV´s actuators. This controller greatly reduces the system´s rise time, delay time, and increase the accuracy of speed control of brushless motors. Finally, a driver circuit is designed and a PCB board is produced to implement proposed speed controller design. Experiment results are presented to show that the proposed controller design achieves good motor speed control performance.