Control System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

An open project, dealing with autopilot design for autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is introduced in this paper. Networked hierarchical distributed control system is being proposed and its hardware and software structure is briefly described. Mathematical model of a small rotorcraft is presented and identification methodology and state estimation using Extended Kalman Filter are discussed. Control algorithms, based on PI, LQG and SDRE approaches, focused on rotorcraft UAVs are proposed, including a complex hierarchical autopilot design. Real data, measured during test-flights of an experimental UAV, are presented.