Attitude control of a drone by a single CMG considering the translational system

Abstract

Drones, whose applications are rapidly expanding in recent years, have a wide range of uses, such as material transportation, pesticide spraying, structure inspection, and even the recently-flying cars, but it is difficult to fly in bad weather such as gusts. On the other hand, CMGs (control moment gyros) are known to have a precession property that tries to rotate in the direction perpendicular to the external force applied to the axis of rotation. Therefore, we wondered if the self-sustained control of the motorcycle using the CMG developed by the authors could be applied to the attitude control of the drone. Although the weight reduction is an important issue for drones, about 1 kg of weight is added when the CMG is mounted. As a result of comparing the control performance between the case where the weight and power consumption corresponding to the CMG are used for control (without CMG) and that where the CMG is installed (with CMG), it was shown that the control effect against wind disturbance was better when the CMG was installed even when the CMG weight was taken into account. In this paper, we confirmed by experiments that mounting a CMG on a drone has a suppressing effect even when a disturbance equivalent to a wind speed of 22 m/s is applied, and furthermore confirmed that the vibration of 2 to 4 Hz was damped.

Keywords

• drone
• cmg
• gyroscopic effect
• control
• rotation coordinate
• euler’s equation