X4-MaG: A Low-Cost Open-Source Micro-Quadrotor and its Linux-Based Controller

Abstract

The new open-source quadrotor platform called X4-MaG presented here was developed for academic and research applications. X4-MaG is a small, low-cost open quadrotor of only 307–grammes which offers two levels of controllers providing a manual mode and an automatic mode thanks to powerful Linux-based controller embedded onboard. The experiments presented here show the reliability of the open hardware and software embedded onboard the quadrotor. To estimate the robot s attitude, a quaternion-based complementary filter requiring very few computational resources was developed and implemented on an 8-bit Arduino board. It was also established that the stabilization feedback system based on quaternions tracks the attitude setpoints with precision up to twice greater than a classical cascaded PI controller. The controllers and estimators were designed in the Matlab/Simulink environment and directly implemented onboard the tiny Linux-based autopilot board using a custom made toolbox (RT-MaG toolbox). The autopilot was tested in the brand-new Marseilles Flying Arena with various 3-D flight trajectories and found to be highly accurate with errors of only 0.7cm in hover and less than 3.2cm at 1.2m.s⁻¹. The X4-MaG quadrotor was able to reach speeds greater than 2m.s⁻¹ and reject attitude disturbances of 20′ within 0.8s.

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