Embedding Adaptive Features in the ArduPilot Control Architecture for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The operation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is often subject to state-dependent alterations and unstructured uncertainty factors, such as unmodelled dynamics, environmental weather disturbances, aerodynamics gradients, or changes in inertia and mass due to payloads. While a large number of autopilot solutions have been proposed to operate...

ArduPilot-Based Adaptive Autopilot: Architecture and Software-in-The-Loop Experiments

This article presents an adaptive method for ArduPilot-based autopilots of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). ArduPilot is a popular open-source unmanned vehicle software suite. We explore how to augment the PID loops embedded inside ArduPilot with a model-free adaptive control method. The adaptive augmentation, adopted for both...