Attitude Stabilization for a Quadrotor Helicopter Using a PD Controller

This paper is aimed at stabilizing the attitude of a quadrotor using a PD controller. In order to simplify the attitude dynamic model of the quadrotor, a dynamic compensation is used to offset the Coriolis and gyroscopic torques. Considering the practical flying that the quadrotor keeps hovering or moving with small angles in most of time, the small-angle approximation is used to decouple the attitude dynamic model. Under the compensation and approximation, the PD controller is used and the last experiment illustrates its performance.