Attitude Control & Stable Indoor Hover

Overview

• The controller everything else stands on: attitude stabilization tracking roll, pitch, and yaw setpoints, refined across six Simulink model iterations, then deployed to hold a steady indoor hover.
• Extended beyond the quadrotor with a hexacopter position control study in Simulink simulation, porting the same cascaded control architecture to a six rotor airframe.

Design & Build

• Modeling: The flight control model was developed and tuned in Simulink, iterating six versions before hardware deployment.
• Estimation: State comes from onboard fusion of ultrasound altitude, pressure, IMU rates and accelerations, and optical flow from the downward camera.
• Deployment: The controller runs onboard the Mambo, stabilizing attitude against drift and disturbance in ground effect.
• Hexacopter extension: The position and attitude control problem rebuilt for a six rotor airframe in simulation: the cascaded loops carry over unchanged while motor mixing reallocates thrust, roll, pitch, and yaw across three rotor pairs, with the actuation redundancy quadrotors lack.

Challenges

• Tuning gains that behave in simulation and survive real airframes.
• Indoor air disturbance and ground effect near the floor.

Result

• Steady, sustained indoor hover on the physical drone.

Skills & Tools