Development of an autonomous flying robot and its verification via flight control experiment

This paper presents development of an autonomous flying robot (unmanned aerial vehicle) and its verification via flight control experiment. The autonomous flying robot has a global positioning system (GPS) sensor to control its altitude and also a wireless camera to gather visual information from the air. First, we construct a longitudinal model of the autonomous flying robot to design a stable controller using a common Lyapunov approach. The longitudinal model has three degree of freedom, i.e., the altitude, the horizontal position and the pitch angle. A stable controller is designed so as to guarantee the stability of the trajectory tracking control system for the three-degree-of-freedom model. The experimental result demonstrates the viability of the stable trajectory tracking control.