A MATHEMATICAL MODELING FOR DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF CONTROL LAWS FOR UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE (UAV)

Flight Mechanics and Control Laboratory of School of Aerospace Engineering -USM has been designing and developing an unmanned aerial vehicle since year 2003. The temporary result of this effort is a remotely piloted vehicle (RPV) that is controlled by radio control on the ground. In order to convert the RPV to be an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that can performs the autonomous aerial surveillance and reconnaissance missions for civilian purposes, the autonomous control laws/algorithms, like damper, attitude hold/select, altitude hold/select, auto-throttle, coordinated turn and waypoints following, have been designed, and developed. This paper will discuss the step by step procedure in the design and development of the control laws of UAV starting from determination of stability/control derivatives, setting up the non-linear flight model/equation of motion, trim determination, flight dynamics analysis, designing the control laws and gain scheduling development, and the simulation of control laws in form all software simulation, the hardware in the loop simulation (HILS) and the Iron-bird simulation before doing the flight testing.