Aerodynamic Disturbance Rejection Acting on a Quadcopter Near Ground

Abstract

Quadcopters can be used in search, rescue and surveillance operations, but under these conditions, they experience aerodynamic disturbances caused by the surfaces that are close to them. In this work, we propose a disturbance rejection strategy for the outer loop control of a quadrotor in the presence of ground effect. The strategy is based on the rapid switching of control algorithms with a novel switching method. We prove that under our approach, it is possible to improve the flight performance near ground compared to standard methods that use conventional position feedback.