ROBUST BI-COPTER CONTROL

Examining and implementing robust control techniques

Real-world control systems are subject to uncertainties and disturbances that can affect their performance and stability.
Traditional control techniques like PID may not be effective in handling these uncertainties.
Robust control techniques explicitly account for uncertainties and disturbances in the system.
The use of robust control techniques can improve performance, stability, and reliability in many practical applications.
We try to examine, implement and test some of the well-known robust control techniques such as H-infinity Loop-shaping, H-infinity Optimal Control, H2 Optimal Control, and Mu-synthesis on the Quanser Bi-copter system.
The Quanser Bicopter is a popular platform for research and education in the field of control engineering. The Quanser Bicopter is a highly nonlinear and under-actuated system. This makes it an interesting and challenging platform for developing and testing advanced control techniques.

Our team worked on the simulation and hardware implementation by coding these individual controllers in MATLAB.
We developed performance weights, uncertainty weights as well as the uncertain plant model and tuned the weights to achieve best results.
Before testing the controllers on the hardware, we implemented them on the simulation and measured the errors in yaw angles and pitch angles by providing a reference square wave.
We achieved robust stability with all of the controller implementations on simulation as well as hardware!

As the lead hardware and Musyn controller developer on the team, my task was to ensure that the hardware runs correctly with all the controllers developed by my teammates.
Develop the musyn controller using same performance weights used to tune the H-infinity Optimal controller and H2-Optimal controller.
Plot the simulation results for yaw and pitch angle error.
Figure out and fix hardware debugging errors.
Take hardware output readings (yaw and pitch errors), plot them, observe, infer and conclude the performance of the implemented controllers.

Mu-syn Controller Performance for Pitch and Yaw

(Reference input is a square wave)

Mu-syn Controller Input (i.e. Voltage)

(Voltage is saturated to 25 V on hardware)