Mansoor Ahsan and Khalid Rafique and Farrukh Mazhar
Optimization Based Tuning of Autopilot Gains for a Fixed Wing UAV
781 - 786
2013
7
5
International Journal of Computer and Systems Engineering
https://publications.waset.org/pdf/16191
https://publications.waset.org/vol/77
World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained tremendous importance, in both Military and Civil, during first decade of this century. In a UAV, onboard computer (autopilot) autonomously controls the flight and navigation of the aircraft. Based on the aircraft role and flight envelope, basic to complex and sophisticated controllers are used to stabilize the aircraft flight parameters. These controllers constitute the autopilot system for UAVs. The autopilot systems, most commonly, provide lateral and longitudinal control through ProportionalIntegralDerivative (PID) controllers or Phaselead or Lag Compensators. Various techniques are commonly used to ‘tune’ gains of these controllers. Some techniques used are, inflight stepbystep tuning, softwareinloop or hardwareinloop tuning methods. Subsequently, numerous inflight tests are required to actually ‘finetune’ these gains. However, an optimizationbased tuning of these PID controllers or compensators, as presented in this paper, can greatly minimize the requirement of inflight ‘tuning’ and substantially reduce the risks and cost involved in flighttesting.
Open Science Index 77, 2013