Rapid sensing of body motions is critical to stabilizing a flight vehicle in the presence of exogenous disturbances as well as providing high-performance tracking of desired control commands. This bandwidth requirement becomes more stringent as vehicle scale decreases. Many flying insects employ distributed networks of acceleration-sensitive sensors to provide information about body egomotion to rapidly detect forces and torques. In this work, a method for rapid sensing of force and torque using a distributed array of accelerometers, arbitrarily placed and rigidly affixed to a vehicle airframe, was developed. Simulations of the sensor array were performed to quantify the effects of sensor noise, sensor position error, and sensor number on acceleration state estimates. A hardware implementation of this distributed sensor array was designed and integrated into the avionics of a small quadrotor vehicle. The response of the array to induced acceleration stimuli was characterized. A linear state estimation matrix was derived from the calibration to directly estimate the total forces and torques exerted on the airframe. A force-adaptive control law utilizing the force and torque estimates provided by the sensor network was implemented to improve tracking of reference states while rejecting exogenous force and torque disturbances. Successful rejection of disturbances in the form of internal actuator variation and external wind gusts was demonstrated on the quadrotor vehicle in flight.
Disturbance Rejection with Distributed Acceleration Sensing for Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems
AIAA Journal ; 54 , 8 ; 2233-2246
2016-05-13
14 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
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