Attitude control of drone by using twin CMGs

Abstract

Drones, whose applications have been rapidly expanding in recent years, have a wide range of uses, such as transporting goods, spraying pesticides, inspecting structures, and even flying cars, which have become a hot topic in recent years. However, it is difficult to fly in bad weather such as gusty winds. To solve these problems, flight stability has been controlled by manipulating the rotation speed of the propeller. However, it is not desirable to use a propeller for flight stability in bad weather conditions. Therefore, the authors developed a drone equipped with a CMG(Control Moment Gyro), which has the property of rotating in a direction perpendicular to the force applied to the axis of rotation from the outside, and confirmed the suppression effect of pitch angle fluctuation through experiments. In this paper, based on these findings, we developed and tested a drone equipped with two CMGs that can suppress the variation of pitch and roll angles. As a result, the variation of pitch and roll angles without CMGs was 20 degrees and 25 degrees, respectively, while the variation of pitch and roll angles with CMGs was 12 degrees and 16 degrees, respectively. In the case of the CMG, the pitch and roll angles fluctuated by 20 and 25 degrees, respectively. In addition, it is necessary to operate the controller to keep the drone as level as possible before applying disturbance, and we confirmed that the variation of pitch angle and roll angle with CMG is less than that without CMG.