Quadrotor station-keeping performance over a moving ship

The goal of this paper is to quantify vehicle performance with regard to station-keeping quadrotors of different sizes over moving ships through simulation. The ship was subjected to a variable intensity sea state based on SCONE data [1]. The dynamics of the quadrotor were given in literature as well as derived for a large vehicle. An LQR controller was used as a standard control method with which to compare the performance of quadrotors by driving the position of the quadrotor to a fixed station-keeping point. In all three axes of motion, the performance of the large quadrotor was slightly better than the small vehicle, but this is likely due to the simplifications made in the large vehicle derivation. Beyond this, the performance of both vehicles was similar in all cases, which indicates that the frequency and amplitude of oscillations in the SCONE data were not large enough to cause a significant difference in performance between the two vehicle sizes.