Modeling and Simulation of a Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate a design of low-cost, and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) based autopilot that is ArduPilot, and its applications. ArduPilot's control algorithm possesses two control loops, which are used to control the navigation and the control surfaces such as actuators. Due to using PID control and being able to tune and update the PID parameters (Kp, Ki, Kd) even during the flight, ArduPilot becomes very efficient autopilot also. It's also possible to export and analyze the data such as airspeed, air pressure, latitude-longitude-altitude, roll-pitch-yaw angles, accelerometer-gyro information, servo outputs, and moreover on Matlab®, after or during the flight. In order to go one step further, a model aircraft, which has nearly the same physical parameters as the one used for the real tests, designed on Plane Maker®, and simulated on Xplane® simulator. Using the simulator made this study easy to tune and test the whole flight parameters before real flight. This paper will lead the students who are interested in automatic control applications especially Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.