Autonomous waypoint-based guidance methods for small size unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

The AERObot is a special ARM microcontroller-based autopilot for small and medium size UAVs1 developed at Óbuda Universtiy for research purposes. The aim of the research was to create a generic autopilot which is capable of controlling different design, weight and structure airframes without any complex parameter or model recalculation as usual for e.g. switching between tailless or classic tail aircafts. For this purpose a simple, desired heading-based guidance method was developed which is easy to visualize and needs only a few parameters to be set while the quality remains the same as the existing ones. The paper presents a new guidance method and a few example controller types which can fit it. Test flights were made to demonstrate the real time opeartion and low compution needs of the presented methods.