UAV Intelligent Control Design : A Flight Control Perspective

This research presents a consolidated platform for the development of an autonomous flight control algorithm. The architecture included guidance, control, and navigation modules for a complete flight regime including take-off, waypoint navigation, and landing phases. For optimal performance across a wide range of parametric uncertainties and exogenous inputs, the proposed architecture makes use of a unique combination of the control architecture. A nonlinear 6-DOF flight dynamics model is implemented to represent UAV dynamics. To achieve the desired objectives, dedicated PID controllers for the different flight regimes are designed. A guidance module is then incorporated to generate navigation commands for fully autonomous flight. To verify the efficacy of the algorithm, the designed controller was subjected to extensive nonlinear simulations. Effects of exogenous disturbances were also analyzed. The results demonstrated that all performance specifications for takeoff, waypoints navigation, and landing were successfully achieved with 1% accuracy.