Design of a proportional-integral controller to track pitch angle in a mini aerial vehicle

Abstract

Mini aerial vehicles have gained a lot of significance in the past five decades. The future defense strategies mainly rely upon mini aerial vehicles. In maneuvering a mini aerial vehicle, control of parameters like pitch angle, roll angle, side slip angle, etc., are very crucial and important. Due to geometry and weight constraints, controlling a mini aerial vehicle is very difficult. Mini aerial vehicles also gets easily disturbed from its path because of slight disturbance of wind. As weight constraint is imposed on mini aerial vehicle, low cost sensors are adopted. Low cost sensors gives noisy feedback, which still makes a challenging task to design a controller to track pitch angle for a mini aerial vehicle. The present work attempts to develop a flight simulator for Black Kite mini aerial vehicle and to design a proportional-integral controller to track pitch angle by taking feedback from an observer, which takes consideration of noisy sensor inputs.