Development of skill-free manual control module for easy and safe flight of UAV

This paper describes the design, development and demonstration of a manual UAV control module for easy and safe flight without highly skilled R/C pilot. The developing system enables an UAV operator on the ground to control flight path/attitudes/angular rates of an aircraft easily and intuitively using just a simple game controller. The guidance and navigation commands from the operator are transmitted to an onboard computer through wireless data link, and then control surfaces are driven fully automatically. The control logic is designed based on nonlinear dynamic inversion approach. The implemented control software has been verified by hardware in the loop simulation, and the actual effectiveness has been demonstrated through flight experiments. The developing system could make UAV operation much easier and safer than conventional R/C flight.