Performance Comparison of Two Altitude-Control Algorithms for a Fixed-Wing UAV

摘要：

Uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAV) have proven their tremendous capabilities in military and civil applications. In a UAV, the onboard autopilot autonomously controls the aircraft flight and navigation. The altitude acquire-and-hold is an important function of autopilot, implemented using a control design algorithm that flies the LAV to commanded altitude and maintains it. Most of the commercially available autopilots use ProportionalIntegral-Derivative (Ill)) controllers for altitude and heading control. In this paper, we present a performance comparison of two altitude-controller design techniques, the PID controller and the Phase Lead compensator. We have used a nonlinear mathematical model of the LAV Aerosonde in our work. The nonlinear model is lineraized around a stable trim condition and decoupled for linear controller design. The designed controllers are tested with the nonlinear model in view of small perturbation control theory. The results for the compensated linear and nonlinear models are presented. Our investigation reveals that Phase Lead compensator has inherent strengths compared to PID controller for UAV altitude acquire-and-hold in terms of better transient response, thus improving the payload performance during an altitude-change maneuver. The findings may lead to an effective approach in UAV autopilot design.

关键词： autopilots altitude-control unmanned aerial vehicle PID-control Phase-Lead-compensator

作者: Mansoor Ahsan Kamran Shafique Atif Bin Mansoor

作者单位: National University of Sciences and Technology H-12, Islamabad, Pakistan Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences Nilore, Islamabad, Pakistan

会议类型: 国际会议

会议名称: 2010 International Conference on Measurement and Control Engineering(2010年IEEE测量与控制工程国际会议 ICMCE2010)

会议地点: 成都

会议语种:英文

页码: 441-445

在线出版日期: 2010-11-16（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）