Position Control of an Omni-Directional Aerial Vehicle for Simulating Free-Flyer In-Space Assembly Operations

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-4100.vid The omnicopter has been identified as a small unmanned aerial vehicle capable of simulating small satellite motion during in-space assembly (ISA) operations because it has decoupled translational and rotational motion. By simulating small satellite motion, the omnicopter can serve as a platform for hardware tests of algorithms required for ISA operations, such as computer vision. To accurately simulate satellite motion, the omnicopter needs to track position and attitude trajectories that approximate satellite motion. Therefore, controllers need to mitigate the effects of unmodeled dynamics and other disturbances. Adaptive controllers are one potential solution to this problem. The goal of this research is to use Simulink to compare a PID controller, a model reference adaptive controller (MRAC) with input saturation, and a PID based augmented MRAC controller with input saturation to determine which control scheme yields the best position trajectory tracking. The ability of the controllers to respond to uncertainties are tested by simulating mass increases, motor failure, and random disturbances. It is shown that the adaptive controllers perform better than the non-adaptive controller for large uncertainties.