Experimental Implementation of an Adaptive Digital Autopilot

Abstract: This paper develops an adaptive digital autopilot for quadcopters and presents experimental results. The adaptive digital autopilot is constructed by augmenting the PX4 autopilot control system architecture with adaptive digital control laws based on retrospective cost adaptive control (RCAC). In order to investigate the performance of the adaptive digital autopilot, the default gains of the fixed-gain autopilot are scaled by a small factor, which severely degrades its performance. This scenario thus provides a venue for determining the ability of the adaptive digital autopilot to compensate for the detuned fixed-gain autopilot. The adaptive digital autopilot is tested in simulation and physical flight tests, and the resulting performance improvements are examined.