Implementation of a Vertical Take-off and Landing for DC Motor-based Rotorcraft
Authors: Elmer Magsino, Mark Lorenze Torregoza, and Elmer Dadios
Abstract
This paper uses Matlab/Simulink to demonstrate the vertical take-off and landing control of a rotorcraft, which is assumed to have DC motors instead of the conventional BLDC motors. The rotorcraft system is modeled by its DC motors instead of its nonlinear dynamic model. A PI controller compensates the DC to achieve its desired motor speed. The DC shunt motors are supplied by a 12VDC battery chopped by a 2-quadrant chopper, and have maximum rated speeds of 50000rpm. At this speed, the theoretical reachable maximum height is 10m when the rotorcraft has no load.
Unlike most models, the load disturbance is not equally shared by the DC motors. Instead, each motor carries the actual weight. A fuzzy logic controller is used to determine the necessary individual motor speed to attain the vertical take-off height. During various simulation experiments of four-rotor rotorcraft, the desired altitude load disturbance are introduced to verify system response.
It has been verified that the proposed fuzzy-classical control of DC motors implementing a vertical take-off and landing allows ease in controlling the vertical flight and avoiding too much nonlinearities in the rotorcraft system.