Supervising control for unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

A small UAV is considered as a test UAV, and its already published aerodynamic data is used for its modeling. Proportional Integral Differential (PID) controller is designed for pitch attitude control. Atmospheric disturbances such as wind shear and turbulence significantly influence the attitude of UAVs. For this study rotary gust is considered as atmospheric disturbance. Pitch response in presence of atmospheric disturbance is presented. In order to improve the performance in presence of atmospheric disturbance, a supervisory mechanism is proposed. Supervisory mechanism is composed of two modules, "observer module" and "correction generator module." The human thinking like logic is developed for observer module so that it keeps monitoring the status of flight through specified inputs and outputs from the system and instructs the correction generator module to augment main controller by adding compensation commands. Correction generator module works on fuzzy logic. Simulation results show significant reduction in pitch errors after augmenting the supervisory mechanism, hence proving the efficacy of proposed scheme. © 2013 Saeed ur Rehman Sarwar and Saeed ur Rehman.