Event-based control strategy for the guidance of the Aerosonde UAV

In this work we focus on the development of a new control strategy for the guidance of the Aerosonde UAV. An event-based control strategy has been developed with controllers that have a high efficiency in communication resources usage. The architecture that it is proposed has two principal parameters: the event threshold e̅ and the minimum inter-events time T_min which permit to set the accuracy of the system and the communication bus efficiency. A test laboratory has been implemented in Matlab/Simulink environment and in the flight simulator FlightGear for testing the system. The event-based controller has been checked in perturbed environments (atmospheric gusts and sensor noise) and also it has been compared with a classical discrete-time PI controller. The results obtained show that this new strategy has a high efficiency in communication resources with a similar accuracy than the classical discrete-time control strategy.