Automatic Landing Control Design for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
José Joaquim Vergueiro de Sousa Pereira Osório · Open Repository of the University of Porto (University of Porto) · 2016
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become an important tool for military and civilian operations.They are specially usefull in dull, dirty or dangerous missions.Potential civilian applications include aerial crop surveys, aerial photography, search and rescue, inspection of power lines and pipelines, counting wildlife, delivering medical supplies to otherwise inaccessible regions, detection of illegal hunting, reconnaissance operations, cooperative environment monitoring, policing and surveillance, coordinating humanitarian aid, plume tracking, fire and large-accident investigation, landslide measurement, illegal landfill detection, construction industry or crowd monitoring.Motivated by the above, the first part of the thesis studies the kinematics and the dynamics of fixed-wing UAVs.We start by providing different UAV models: 2D Point Mass model, 2D Coordinated Flight model, 3D model and then a complex 3D model.In the second part of the thesis we analyze trim points, i.e., stationary trajectories of the system that can be performed by the use of appropriate constant inputs.The study and analysis of the trim points provide useful insights and understanding of the range of model validity.We define the trim conditions and provide an explicit formulation for the computation of the stationary trajectories.We perform simulations with the Zagi Flying Wing example based on the computed stationary conditions.In the last part of the thesis, we focus on the control design where the task is to provide the UAVs with the ability to autonomously follow a predefined path.In this work, we focus on two of the most common and widely used control techniques: the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control and the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) control.In particular, we point out the main advantages and disadvantages of those approaches.We also describe their implementations for an UAV and provide simulation results to illustrate their performance.