J Intell Robot Syst (2012) 68:323–338 DOI 10.1007/s10846-012-9680-y A Quadrotor Test Bench for Six Degree of Freedom Flight Yushu Yu · Xilun Ding Received: 4 February 2012 / Accepted: 16 April 2012 / Published online: 15 May 2012 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 Abstract In this paper, a quadrotor test bench that can test and verify the 6 DOF flight controller is presented. The development of controller for aerial vehicle is usually a long and dangerous pro- cedure. It needs series of tests from simulation to real flight. However, there are differences be- tween simulation and real time flight due to the limit of the current simulation technique. The quadrotor test bench presented in the paper aims to fill the gap between simulation and real time flight. The test bench contains a quadrotor at- tached on the base through a sphere joint which let the quadrotor be able to rotate around 3 axes. A 6 axes force/torque sensor is used to simulate the position of the aerial vehicle. The paper pre- sents the detailed system design and implementa- tion of the test bench. Furthermore, the modeling and the parameter identification of the quadrotor on the test bench are described. A 6 DOF con- troller that consists of both guidance controller and attitude controller is designed using a nonlin- ear control technique named trajectory lineariza- Y. Yu · X. Ding (B ) Robotics Institute, School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Beijing 100191, China e-mail: xlding@buaa.edu.cn Y. Yu e-mail: yuyushu@me.buaa.edu.cn tion control (TLC). Finally, the flight tests on the quadrotor test bench are demonstrated. The results indicate the feasibility and the value of the test bench. Keywords Quadrotor · Test bench · Hardware and software system · Parameter identification · Trajectory linearization control · Flight test 1 Introduction Nowadays, the interest on quadrotor UAVs has increased due to some of their merits. The quad- rotor has simple structure, and moreover, the ex- ceptional agility, as it can obtain fast rotational acceleration through its off-center mounting pro- pellers. Many researchers have developed the con- trol system for quadrotor using kinds of method such as feedback linearization [5, 37], back- stepping [5, 9], sliding-mode [22], dynamic inver- sion [10], and Lyapunov function design method [8, 41, 42, 46]. Such theoretical researches have given solid foundation to the application of quad- rotor. Due to their simple mechanism and the high agility, quadrotor vehicles have become idea platforms for performing advanced tasks. Making the quadrotor be able to interact with the environ- ment is appearing [11, 12, 28]. While some work in this area has addressed the aggressive maneu- vering on quadrotor, including robust takeoff and