Position and Heading Angle Control of an Unmanned Quadrotor Helicopter Using LQR Method

This paper discusses the position and heading-angle control for an unmanned quadrotor helicopter. Nonlinear and decoupled linearized dynamics of the vehicle is presented. Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) method is briefly introduced, and based on which vehicle attitude angles and position command execution laws are constructed. Using the decoupled dynamics of vehicle, position tracking signal is transformed into the form of pitch/roll angles command input, and could be performed by adopting the attitude angles to be executed as inner loop of the control framework. Performance of the control framework is tested using a real vehicle for height and heading angle control, and corresponding results are presented and discussed.