In recent years, more and more light aircraft enter our daily life, from Agricultural applications, emergency rescue, flight experiment and training to Barriers to entry, light aircraft always have their own advantages. Thus, they have become more and more popular. However, in the process of GDP research about Flight Control System design for the Flying Crane, the author read a lot of literature about Flight Control System design, then noticed that the research in Flight Control System have apparently neglected to Low-cost vehicles. So it is necessary to do some study about Flight Control System for this kind of airplane. The study will more concern the control law design for ultra-light aircraft, the author hopes that with an ‘intelligence’ Flight Control System design, this kind of aircraft could sometimes perform flying tasks according to a prearranged flight path and without a pilot. As the Piper J-3 cub is very popular and the airframe data can be obtained more easily, it was selected as an objective aircraft for the control law design. Finally, a ¼ scale Piper J-3 cub model is selected and the aerodynamics coefficients are calculated by DATCOM and AVL. Based on the forces and moments acting on the aircraft, the trim equilibrium was calculated for getting proper dynamics coefficients for the selected flight conditions. With the aircraft aerodynamics coefficients, the aircraft dynamics characteristics and flying qualities are also analyzed. The model studied in this thesis cannot answer level one flying qualities in the longitudinal axis, which is required by MIL-F- 8785C. The stability augment system is designed to improve the flying qualities of the longitudinal axis. The work for autopilot design in this thesis includes five parts. First, the whole flight profile is designed to automatically control aircraft from takeoff to landing. Second, takeoff performance and guidance law is studied. Then, landing performance and trajectory is also investigated. After that, the control law design is decoupled into longitudinal axis and later-directional axis. Finally, simulation is executed to check the performance for the auto-controller.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used increasingly over the past few years. Special Forces of various countries utilise these systems successfully in war zones such as Afghanistan. The biggest advantage is rapid information gathering without endangering human lives. The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) also identified the need for local short range aerial reconnaissance and information gathering. A detailed literature survey identified various international players involved in the development of small hand-launch UAV systems. Unfortunately, these overseas systems are too expensive for the SANDF. A new system had to be developed locally to comply with the unique requirements, and budget, of the SANDF. The survey of existing systems provided valuable input to the detailed user requirement statement (URS) for the new South African development. The next step was to build a prototype using off-the-shelf components. Although this aircraft flew and produced good video images, it turned out to be unreliable. The prototype UAV was then replaced with a standard type model aircraft, purchased from Micropilot. Some modifications were needed to ensure better compliance with the URS. Laboratory and field tests proved that the aircraft can be applied for aerial images, within range of 10 km from the ground control station (GCS). The major limitation is that it can only fly for 40 minutes. Furthermore, the airframe is not robust, needing repairs after only 15 flights. Although the system has shortcomings, it has already been used successfully. It is expected that improved battery technologies and sturdier light-weight materials will further help to improve the system beyond user specifications. / Thesis (MIng (Electrical Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used increasingly over the past few years. Special Forces of various countries utilise these systems successfully in war zones such as Afghanistan. The biggest advantage is rapid information gathering without endangering human lives. The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) also identified the need for local short range aerial reconnaissance and information gathering. A detailed literature survey identified various international players involved in the development of small hand-launch UAV systems. Unfortunately, these overseas systems are too expensive for the SANDF. A new system had to be developed locally to comply with the unique requirements, and budget, of the SANDF. The survey of existing systems provided valuable input to the detailed user requirement statement (URS) for the new South African development. The next step was to build a prototype using off-the-shelf components. Although this aircraft flew and produced good video images, it turned out to be unreliable. The prototype UAV was then replaced with a standard type model aircraft, purchased from Micropilot. Some modifications were needed to ensure better compliance with the URS. Laboratory and field tests proved that the aircraft can be applied for aerial images, within range of 10 km from the ground control station (GCS). The major limitation is that it can only fly for 40 minutes. Furthermore, the airframe is not robust, needing repairs after only 15 flights. Although the system has shortcomings, it has already been used successfully. It is expected that improved battery technologies and sturdier light-weight materials will further help to improve the system beyond user specifications. / Thesis (MIng (Electrical Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Airborne Wind Energy Systems (AWES) harness the power of high-altitude winds using tethered planes or kites. Continuous and reliable operation requires that AWES become autonomous devices, but the wind intermittency forces the system to repeatedly take-off to start, and land to shut-off. Therefore, a common approach to facilitate the operation is implementing Vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) functionality. This thesis models and simulates AWES flights working towards the implementation of flight controller hardware and autonomous operation of an AWES demonstrator platform. The Ardupilot open-source autopilot platform provides a convenient tool for modeling, simulation, and hardware implementation of small-scale airplanes. An AWES lab-scale demonstrator was developed to obtain operational insight, get preliminary flight data, and real-world experience in this technology. A quadplane was developed by combining a structurally reinforced glider with VTOL and autopilot components. Its performance is obtained from static and aerodynamic studies and converted into the Ardupilot parameter format to define it in the simulation. An AWES flight model was developed from the ground up to evaluate the performance of a simple flight controller in trajectory tracking. The Ardupilot Software-in-Loop (SIL) tool expands the simulation capabilities by running the flight controller code without requiring any hardware. This allowed controller tuning and flight plan evaluation with a more advanced fight model. AWES crosswind flight simulation was only possible due to the incorporation of an elastic tether and an ideal winch into the physics model. As a result, different trajectories and configurations were tested to find the optimal parameters that were uploaded to the flight controller board. The operational capabilities of the AWES demonstrator were expanded with a flight testing campaign. By targeting individual objectives, each test gradually increased its complexity and ensured that the flight envelope was safely expanded. The results were validated with the simulation before moving on to the next flight test. The testing campaign is still underway due to challenges and limitations presented by the legal and logistical aspects of operating the quadplane. However, preliminary flight tests in VTOL mode have been completed and were consistent with the simulated results in terms of autonomous waypoint navigation and attitude control. / Graduate

The thesis is focused on the small UAV’s rescue system design. The thesis is divided into related sections reflecting the design process. The first part deals with general problems of parachute equipment. Another part is evaluating critical situations in manual and autonomous control of the airplane. The deceleration device is based on this critical situations as well as the calculated structure loading. Next is the description and evaluation of experiments to verify the performance of modern parachutes. The thesis also includes a simplified proposal ejection mechanism designed in 3D software and documentation of the of model aircraft construction for testing and predicting behaviour in autonomous flight mode.

This thesis describe approaches for autopilots for small unmanned aerial vehicles. Part of thesis is implementation of autopilot in Matlab/Simulink. The goal is to control computation model of the aircraft. Main part of thesis desribes high layer of control and navigation with focus on trajectory planning. Final algorithm is based on following the reference point between the aircraft and waypoint. Algorithm solves special positions of waypoints and error flag.

The thesis aims to design and implement an Android application with ability to control the autopilot of the Skydog aircraft model using the wireless telemetry. The application shall receive data from an aircraft model gathered from various installed sensors. These data shall be then processed and corresponding instructions for autopilot shall be sent back. When collision with terrain or obstacle is detected, the application shall send instructions to autopilot to avoid such collision. RRT algorithm is used to find collision-free flight trajectory. Database of known obstacles and digital terrain model are provided to application in formats XML and GeoTIFF respectively.

No description available.

In this dissertation, we focus on the strategy that places and stabilizes the path of an aerial drogue, which is towed by a mothership aircraft using a long flexible cable, onto a horizontally flat orbit by maneuvering the mothership in the presence of wind. To achieve this goal, several studies for towed cable systems are conducted, which include the dynamic modeling for the cable, trajectory generation strategies for the mothership, trajectory-tracking control law design, and simulation and flight test implementations. First, a discretized approximation method based on finite element and lumped mass is employed to establish the mathematical model for the towed cable system in the simulation. Two approaches, Gauss's Principle and Newton's second law, are utilized to derive the equations of motion for inelastic and elastic cables, respectively. The preliminary studies for several key parameters of the system are conducted to learn their sensitivities to the system motion in the steady state. Flight test results are used to validate the mathematical model as well as to determine an appropriate number of cable links. Furthermore, differential flatness and model predictive control based methods are used to produce a mothership trajectory that leads the drogue onto a desired orbit. Different desired drogue orbits are utilized to generate required mothership trajectories in different wind conditions. The trajectory generation for a transitional flight in which the system flies from a straight and level flight into a circular orbit is also presented. The numerical results are presented to illustrate the required mothership orbits and its maneuverability in different wind conditions. A waypoint following based strategy for mothership to track its desired trajectory in flight test is developed. The flight test results are also presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the trajectory generation methods. In addition, a nonlinear time-varying feedback control law is developed to regulate the mothership to follow the desired trajectory in the presence of wind. Cable tensions and wind disturbance are taken into account in the design model and Lyapunov based backstepping technique is employed to develop the controller. The mothership tracking error is proved to be capable of exponentially converging to an ultimate bound, which is a function of the upper limit of the unknown component of the wind. The simulation results are presented to validate the controller. Finally, a trajectory-tracking strategy for unmanned aerial vehicles is developed where the autopilot is involved in the feedback controller design. The trajectory-tracking controller is derived based on a generalized design model using Lyapunov based backstepping. The augmentations of the design model and trajectory-tracking controller are conducted to involve the autopilot in the closed-loop system. Lyapunov stability theory is used to guarantee the augmented controller is capable of driving the vehicle to exponentially converge to and follow the desired trajectory with the other states remaining bounded. Numerical and Software-In-the-Loop simulation results are presented to validate the augmented controller. This method presents a framework of implementing the developed trajectory-tracking controllers for unmanned aerial vehicles without any modification to the autopilot.

The role of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has significantly expanded in the military sector during the last decades mainly due to their cost effectiveness and their ability to eliminate the human life risk. Current UAV technology supports a variety of missions and extensive research and development is being performed to further expand its capabilities. One particular field of interest is the area of the low cost expendable UAV since its small price tag makes it an attractive solution for target suppression. A swarm of these low cost UAVs can be utilized as guided munitions or kamikaze UAVs to attack multiple targets simultaneously. The focus of this thesis is the development of a cooperative online path planning algorithm that coordinates the trajectories of these UAVs to achieve a simultaneous arrival to their dynamic targets. A nonlinear autopilot design based on the dynamic inversion technique is also presented which stabilizes the dynamics of the UAV in its entire operating envelope. A nonlinear high fidelity six degrees of freedom model of a fixed wing aircraft was developed as well that acted as the main test platform to verify the performance of the presented algorithms.