Home > Published Issues > 2015 > Volume 4, No. 4, October 2015 >

Design and Control of Small Quadcopter System with Motor Closed Loop Speed Control

H. L. Chan and K. T. Woo
Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

Abstract—Most of the motors used on the small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are three-phase brushless direct current (BLDC) motors. Owing to the size of the UAVs and the shape of the motors, most of motors are running without feedbacked control as there are no suitable feedback devices. As the system dynamics of the UAVs are closely related to the rotation speed of the motors, open loop control may result in deviations in terms of thrust and thus cause instability of the flight attitudes. A sensorless speed detection scheme of the motors with a controller is implemented to achieve the closed loop speed control. Hierarchical control structure with the motor speed control and the attitude control is used on a quadcopter. The method of adaption of attitude control to motor speed control is presented. Experimental results show the improvements of the stability of attitude control and the tolerance on motors with different performance.

Index Terms
—BLDC motor, quadcopter, rotation speed, closed loop motor control, hierarchical control

Cite: H. L. Chan and K. T. Woo, "Design and Control of Small Quadcopter System with Motor Closed Loop Speed Control," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol.4, No. 4, pp. 287-292, October 2015. DOI: 10.18178/ijmerr.4.4.287-292