Experimental Flight Testing of an Adaptive Autopilot with Parameter Drift Mitigation

Abstract: This paper modifies an adaptive multicopter autopilot to mitigate instabilities caused by adaptive parameter drift and presents simulation and experimental results to validate the modified autopilot. The modified adaptive controller is obtained by including a static nonlinearity in the adaptive loop, updated by the retrospective cost adaptive control algorithm. It is shown in simulation and physical test experiments that the adaptive autopilot with proposed modifications can continually improve the fixed-gain autopilot as well as prevent the drift of the adaptive parameters, thus improving the robustness of the adaptive autopilot.