Design and Control of Drones

Abstract

The design and control of drones remain areas of active research, and here we review recent progress in this field. In this article, we discuss the design objectives and related physical scaling laws, focusing on energy consumption, agility and speed, and survivability and robustness. We divide the control of such vehicles into low-level stabilization and higher-level planning such as motion planning, and we argue that a highly relevant problem is the integration of sensing with control and planning. Lastly, we describe some vehicle morphologies and the trade-offs that they represent. We specifically compare multicopters with winged designs and consider the effects of multivehicle teams.