Estimation of Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Lateral Dynamic Model with System Identification Approaches

Abstract

Modeling of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with system identification is very important in terms of its model-based effective control. The modeling of UAV is required for aircraft crashes, analyzing autonomous aircrafts, preventing external disturbances, pre-flight analysis. However, since UAV has nonlinear inherent dynamics including inherent chaoticity and fractality, it becomes difficult to obtain a mathematical model under external disturbance. In this study, some of the inherent nonlinear dynamics of UAV are linearized and the model of UAV is obtained by system identification approaches under external disturbance. The linearized lateral dynamics of a fixed wing UAV is used in this study. Further, the flight motion equations applied to fixed wing UAV have been utilized for obtaining the coefficients of lateral model for straight and level flight. The roll angles are calculated using transfer functions for aileron, rudder and deflections inputs. The autoregressive exogenous (ARX), autoregressive moving average with exogenous (ARMAX) and output error (OE) parametric system identification approaches are performed to estimate UAV lateral dynamic system response as using empirical input-output data sets. The accuracy of parametric model estimation and model degrees are compared for different external disturbance effects.