Experimental Implementation of an Adaptive Digital Autopilot

TL;DR

This paper presents an adaptive digital autopilot for quadcopters that enhances control performance by compensating for detuned fixed-gain settings, validated through simulation and real-world flight tests.

Contribution

It introduces an adaptive control law based on RCAC integrated into the PX4 autopilot, demonstrating improved robustness over traditional fixed-gain controllers.

Findings

Adaptive autopilot compensates for degraded fixed-gain performance.

Experimental results show significant performance improvements.

Validated in both simulation and physical flight tests.

Abstract

This paper develops an adaptive digital autopilot for quadcopters and presents experimental results. The adaptive digital autopilot is constructed by augmenting the PX4 autopilot control system architecture with adaptive digital control laws based on retrospective cost adaptive control (RCAC). In order to investigate the performance of the adaptive digital autopilot, the default gains of the fixed-gain autopilot are scaled by a small factor, which severely degrades its performance. This scenario thus provides a venue for determining the ability of the adaptive digital autopilot to compensate for the detuned fixed-gain autopilot. The adaptive digital autopilot is tested in simulation and physical flight tests, and the resulting performance improvements are examined.