Flight path PID controller for propeller-driven fixed- wing unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

The world of the future will be filled with intelligent unmanned aircraft employed to autonomously perform tasks and substituting human efforts in applications where human operation is dangerous, inefficient and/or impossible. Towards this goal, an autonomous flight path state holding for a fixed-wing propeller-driven unmanned aircraft is developed. The development is based on the utilization of a “proportional-integral-derivative” control loops structure. The proposed control loops are turn and turn-rate, airspeed and altitude states holding. The control structure provides a low level control necessarily for mission planning and execution. Details about the UAV dynamics and “propeller-driven modeling” are provided. The control algorithm generates the control law for a UAV while explicitly dealing with their multi-input multi-output non-linear dynamics, input saturation and state constraints. The UAV dynamics response together with controller closed loop response is then presented. Simulations were performed to test the performance of the proposed system and the aircraft succeeded in following the desired states. Simulation results show that the proposed controller can be effectively used for holding desired states of a UAV’s commanded path. Key words: Unmanned aerial vehicle, flight path controller, control and autonomous flight, proportional-integral-derivative.