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Autopilot Design

Overview
The main purpose of the autopilot is to enable the unmanned aircraft to accomplish their mission autonomously, without any (or with minimal) input from the operator. An autopilot is using the aircraft state information provided by the on-board sensors to drive the control surface actuators (servos). UNMANNED DYNAMICS designs autopilot algorithms that provide autonomy to the aircraft in all phases of a typical UAV mission, including automated take-off and landing.

Consulting Services

Typical UAV mission

There are three hierarchical levels of control that can be identified in a modern UAV autopilot system:

Low-level Control (Stability & Control)


This level includes the stability and control loops. These provide the airplane with improved dynamic stability, regulation of flight parameters, as well as tracking of basic autopilot commands. Although there are many control law architectures, the classic PID control approach augmented with online gain scheduling provides the ideal mix of robustness and performance for typical aircraft dynamics. The stability loops include the Pitch, Roll, and Yaw Dampers. Typical control loops implemented on UAVs are: Airspeed Hold, Altitude Hold, Altitude Rate Hold, Turn Compensation, Turn Coordination, Turn Rate Control, Bank Angle Hold, Heading Hold.

Airspeed Hold using classic PID control

The stability and control loops can be tuned to provide the desired performance and robustness specifications by adjusting a set of autopilot parameters or gains. This is done through linear analysis - the nonlinear aircraft model is linearized for a representative set of flight conditions that cover the operating envelope of the aircraft. The linear dynamics of the closed-loop system (aircraft + autopilot) are analyzed in terms of stability and control responses (overshoot, settling time).
UNMANNED DYNAMICS is using MATLAB/SIMULINK by The Mathworks, Inc. as development platform for flight control system design. MATLAB provides an integrated development environment in which flight control laws can be designed graphically as block diagrams, and the response of the aircraft+autopilot closed-loop system can be analyzed through simulation.

Aircraft response to bank angle command

Mid-level Control (Navigation)


The mid-level control provides guidance and navigation capability to the UAV automatic take-off and landing, climb, cruise, and loiter. This includes generation of safe autopilot commands for the low-level control laws as well as specialized navigation algorithms such as a Flightplan Tracker or a Glideslope Coupler. Our nonlinear tracker design (AIAA paper 2001-0016) provides smooth, exponential convergence of the aircraft to the current flightplan segment regardless of the aircraft speed.

Unmanned Dynamics

Flightplan segment tracking strategy

www.u-dynamics.com

High-level Control (Autonomy)


The highest level of control is arguably the most complex and it provides a higher degree of autonomy to the Unmanned Air Vehicle. This involves interpreting the mission objectives and safety constraints, awareness of the current aircraft and environment conditions, online updates of the mission plan such that the mission objectives are optimally achieved. This level also provides a certain amount of fault tolerance to the UAV system by detecting sensor, actuator, or airframe faults and reconfiguring the low and mid-level control algorithms appropriately.

UAV Autopilot Architecture

Piccolo Avionics Integration


PICCOLO is a highly-integrated programmable autopilot for small UAVs developed by CLOUD CAP TECHNOLOGY. UNMANNED DYNAMICS has contributed to the PICCOLO project by providing the flight control algorithms that run on-board this miniature avionics, as well as the nonlinear aircraft model used by the Piccolo Hardware-in-Loop Simulator. We have extensive knowledge of the Piccolo system architecture and development environment, and we provide support for fast and efficient integration of this avionics in custom UAV applications.

PICCOLO - a miniature avionics system for Unmanned Air Vehicles (by Cloud Cap Technology, Inc.)

Here are some of the integration services that UNMANNED DYNAMICS can provide to Piccolo customers: Development of custom aircraft models for the Piccolo HIL Simulator Autopilot gain tuning Development of custom autopilot architectures Flight-testing of Piccolo-equipped aircraft Payload integration - CAN bus or serial connection Satellite datalinks - Iridium Cellular network datalink - GSM

Contact Information
Unmanned Dynamics, LLC
Phone: (541) 308-0894 Fax: (541) 387-2030 No. 8 Fourth St. Hood River, OR 97031

Cloud Cap Technology, Inc.


Web: http://www.cloudcaptech.com

Email: info@u-dynamics.com Web: http://www.u-dynamics.com

Phone: (541) 387-2120 Fax: (541) 387-2030

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