This thesis concerns with the design and development of automatic flight controller strategies
for the autonomous landing of fixed wing unmanned aircraft subject to severe environmental
conditions. The Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (TUAV) designed at the Middle East Technical University (METU) is used as the subject platform. In the first part of this thesis, a
dynamic model of the TUAV is developed in FORTRAN environment. The dynamic model is
used to establish the stability characteristics of the TUAV. The simulation model also incorporates ground reaction and atmospheric models. Based on this model, the landing trajectory
that provides shortest landing distance and smallest approach time is determined. Then, an
automatic flight control system is designed for the autonomous landing of the TUAV. The
controller uses a model inversion approach based on the dynamic model characteristics. Feed
forward and mixing terms are added to increase performance of the autopilot. Landing strategies are developed under adverse atmospheric conditions and performance of three different
classical controllers are compared. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the
effectiveness of the design. Simulation cases include landing under crosswind, head wind, tail
wind, wind shear and turbulence.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12608996/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 October 2007 |
| Creators | Kargin, Volkan |
| Contributors | Yavrucuk, Ilkay |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | M.S. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for public access |
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