I’ve decided to build a QuadCopter and in an effort to really learn, I have decided to design and implement the Flight Controller and IMU myself using an Arduino rather than purchasing an off-the-shelf flight controller.
In order to maintain stability, the quadcopter must continuously take measurements from the IMU sensors and make adjustments to the speed of each rotor to keep the aircraft level. Flight control is achieved by varying the relative thrusts of the individual rotors.
I am using a PID (proportional-integral-derivative) controller to calculate the output for each of the three axes. This uses the signals from the receiver as setpoints and compares them to the actual angle values measured by the IMU. The difference is fed back into the PID controller to calculate new output values. The calculated roll, pitch, and yaw values are mixed together to generate the relative output of each motor.
Required external libraries have been included in the libraries folder of this repository. However, as with all Arduino libraries, you will need to copy them to the libraries folder of your Arduino installation before opening the sketch.
I have been testing it on an Arduino Uno but it should work on any Arduino board with sufficient I/O. You will need at least 4 Input pins and 5 Output pins as well as I2C and a Serial output for debugging. Also, this firmware has been tuned for my Motors, ESCs, and frame. If you are using different components, you will need to specify different tuning parameters (especially in the PID section).
I am using the gyroscope and accelerometer from an ArduImu v3 board with custom firmware to provide orientation information. The data is transferred to the flight controller board over I2C. The IMU project is available as a separate project on GitHub.
For more info and videos, see the following: My Quadcopter Pages
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