An Autonomous Flight Control Strategy Study of a Small-Sized Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a case study of the development, implementation and performance analysis of an autonomous flight control strategy for a 1-meter small-sized unmanned aerial vehicle. Firstly, a learning algorithm based open-loop control is proposed by simulating a skilled human operator's manipulation of the aircraft. This is aimed to generate a set of command data inputs and investigate the multichannel control characteristics with the open-loop control. Stcondly, a feedforward plus a proportional and derivative (PD) feedback control is employed to control the vehicle in following the command data to complete the loitering flight. The PD control gains are tuned automatically according to the attitude of the vehicle using the fuzzy logic theory. Thirdly, autonomous flight experiments conducted on a 1-meter small-sized aerial vehicle demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.