ABSTRACT
The importance of autonomous flight has increased with time and it has become impertinent for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to be able to track a set of given waypoints to reach its desired destination. Similarly, quadrotors are small UAVs used for various domestic missions; moreover, another important aspect of autonomous quadrotors is their ability to avoid domestic hurdles. Numerous hurdles can appear in quadrotor’s navigation path and it is necessary for it to avoid these hurdles to ensure completeness in its mission without failure. The mathematical model of quadrotor is modelled in body-fixed frame and inertial frame. Accurately modeling the dynamics of the quadrotor allows us to check quadrotor in various situations without the need to build a prototype and test in real life. The quadrotor 6 DOF is validated through observations in inputs and outputs of mathematical model whether they conform to realistic values. The control architecture employed is the cascade control in which two loops are used – an inner loop and an outer loop – to control the quadrotor with the aid of Proportional-Derivative (PD) controllers. The aim of this paper is to design an autonomous quadrotor capable of tracking a trajectory and a hurdle avoidance algorithm that could enable the quadrotor to achieve a completely autonomous flight. Ingenuity is captured in hurdle avoidance algorithm by using trigonometric relations for new trajectory generation. The platform used for this work was the MATLAB/Simulink environment that allowed us to develop the algorithm and integrate them with the 6 DOF mathematical model of the quadrotor to achieve a completely autonomous UAV. Simulation results showed that the quadrotor accurately followed its desired trajectory and effectively avoided hurdles in its path.
