Multirotor control theory

WolvesOfTheNight

As noted elsewhere I am working on a quadcopter control project. I am currently looking for good documentation on multirotor control theory. I am doing the usual web searching and have found some good information such as this PDF. However, web searches do not always come up with the best sources.

Are there any sources you would recommend? Online sources are nice, but I am happy to track down a book if necessary. I also have access to some journals through the university library (and I will be searching those as time allows).

Publison

Not sure if you looked through the parallax.learn tutorials?

http://learn.parallax.com/elev-8

WolvesOfTheNight

Calibrating and Performance and Understanding the Physics of Multirotor Flight are both good but they are written at a lower level than I am looking for. The PDF I linked to is much closer. Something that assumes the reader has some knowledge of differential equations & control theory and then applies that to multirotors.

macrobeak

Jason Dorie is your go-to-man. If you search the forum you will find some posts on quad control by him.
Here are some articles freely available off the internet. You may have already looked at them. I find the first one quite useful as a starting point;

1) http://owenson.me/build-your-own-quadcopter-autopilot/

2) Full Quaternion Based Attitude Control for a Quadrotor
Emil Fresk and George Nikolakopoulos

3) Foundation of Computer Science FCS, New York, USA Volume 9 – No.8, October 2015 – www.ijais.org

Euler and Quaternion Parameterization in VTOL UAV Dynamics with Test Model Efficiency
Redouane Dargham
Doctoral Student in Computer Engineering National Higher School of Electricity and Mechanics
(EAS, LISER, ENSEM)
Adil Sayouti
PhD Professor,
National Higher School of Electricity and
Mechanics
(ENSEM, EAS, LISER)
Hicham Medromi
PhD ,Professor and Director National Higher School of Electricity and
Mechanics
(ENSEM, EAS, LISER)

JasonDorie

I didn't try to model the dynamics of the system (I have no formal knowledge of differential equations or control theory). I was interested more in the IMU and maintaining the orientation estimate, knowing that if I could track that well that the control part would be relatively easy.

The paper you linked is inaccurate in at least one spot: "If our gyro is precise enough, we can integrate the values obtained from the gyro to get the angles θ and φ." This glosses over one of the larger complexities of the IMU - rotations are not commutative, so simple integration doesn't work, and accumulating errors have to be dealt with and corrected.

Some resources I found useful:
http://ai.stanford.edu/~gabeh/papers/Quadrotor_Dynamics_GNC07.pdf

http://www.x-io.co.uk/open-source-imu-and-ahrs-algorithms/

http://www.starlino.com/dcm_tutorial.html

http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/skoge/prost/proceedings/ecc-2013/data/papers/0927.pdf

Heater.

Keeping a Good Attitude: A Quaternion-Based Orientation Filter for IMUs and MARGs http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/15/8/19302/pdf

WolvesOfTheNight

Thank you for all the information! It will take me awhile to look through it, but I think that it will really help.