Quadrotor aircraft intelligent system identification experiment design

Aircraft prototyping and modeling is usually associated with resource expensive techniques and significant post flight analysis. The NASA Learn-To-Fly concept targets the replacement of the conventional ground-based aircraft model development and prototyping approaches with an efficient real time paradigm. The work presented herein describes the development of an intelligent excitation input design technique that determines excitation frequencies based on predefined rotational motion dynamic model. The input design is then evaluated on quadcopter unmanned aircraft that utilizes the new multisine input design. In order to minimize flight excursions without compromising the modeling capabilities, multisine input power spectrum is optimized based on the vehicle’s frequency response. The proposed methodology emphasizes excitation of modal frequencies which yields flight data rich information content. The generated optimized multisine input design is utilized for a quadcopter aircraft system identification and the performance is compared to conventional uniform amplitudes design. Simulation results show highly accurate model estimation in all identification results in addition to reduction of induced perturbations and power consumption. Additionally, the generated model prediction capabilities are not compromised after power spectrum optimization. Overall, the proposed technique introduces an efficient and intelligent system identification experiment design that can minimize the time and effort spent during excitation input design.