A Generalized Thrust Estimation and Control Approach for Multirotors Micro Aerial Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel BEMT-based thrust estimator and control method for multirotor UAVs, improving robustness over traditional quadratic models during non-hovering flights.

Contribution

It proposes a new BEMT-based closed-loop thrust estimation and control approach that eliminates calibration, using a simple test bench for parameter fitting.

Findings

Enhanced robustness of thrust control during dynamic flight conditions

Reduced calibration effort with a single scaling factor

Validated with outdoor experiments on two UAV sizes

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of thrust estimation and control for the rotors of small-sized multirotors Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Accurate control of the thrust generated by each rotor during flight is one of the main challenges for robust control of quadrotors. The most common approach is to approximate the mapping of rotor speed to thrust with a simple quadratic model. This model is known to fail under non-hovering flight conditions, introducing errors into the control pipeline. One of the approaches to modeling the aerodynamics around the propellers is the Blade Element Momentum Theory (BEMT). Here, we propose a novel BEMT-based closed-loop thrust estimator and control to eliminate the laborious calibration step of finding several aerodynamic coefficients. We aim to reuse known values as a baseline and fit the thrust estimate to values closest to the real ones with a simple test bench experiment, resulting in a single scaling value. A feedforward PID thrust control was implemented for each rotor, and the methods were validated by outdoor experiments with two multirotor UAV platforms: 250mm and 500mm. A statistical analysis of the results showed that the thrust estimation and control provided better robustness under aerodynamically varying flight conditions compared to the quadratic model.