Multi-Agent Testbed development, modelling and control of Quadrotor UAVs

Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been an area of great interest for academic research at several universities around the world. They provide an interesting platform for research into various control related areas such as modeling, testing different control strategies or cooperative behavior and possible real-world applications within search-and-rescue, traffic surveillance and many other areas with the potential to improve everyday life.

In this thesis, the process of designing and implementing a testbed that allows for practical multi-agent control related experiments with Quadrotor UAVs is described. The testbed consists of a centralized controller PC, a positioning system for determining the quadrotors position in space and a bi-directional wireless link for communicating with the quadrotors. The controller PC software in LabVIEW and the various interfaces to the subsystems in C, C# and under TinyOS are implemented considering the main goal to have a robust platform that allows for quick testing and debugging of different control algorithms.

To be able to perform simulation and understand the dynamic behavior of the quadrotors, a mathematical model is derived. The model is then used to design PID and LQR controllers that allow the quadrotors to track a position in space.  The functionality of the testbed, the performance of the controllers and the validity of the model is successfully evaluated by flight-testing the quadrotors using the testbed and verifying that simulation results are in accordance with the real-world results that are obtained.