Designing an altitude controller for a mini-UAV using an automated speed device
Cristian Vidan, Răzvan-Viorel Mihai, Marian Găiceanu, George-Alexandru Ilie · AIP conference proceedings · 2018
In this paper, an altitude control system is designed to increase the positioning accuracy of a mini-UAV on the z-axis of the inertial system and to improve conventional altitude control systems relying only on GPS, barometer or laser sensors which may have significant errors in certain flight conditions. The main objective of the mini-UAV is to monitor and detect a Corona Discharge that usually occurs on high voltage powerlines which implies a very good infrastructure in terms of on-board equipment because of the danger which occur when UAV flies quite close to the powerlines and into an intense electromagnetic field. To design the altitude controller for the longitudinal dynamics a control structure method, based on successively closed loops with different types of classic controllers was used. We concluded that the command structures with speed constraint was necessary to implement a speed device that automatically maintains a constant speed. Thus, the speed device is trying to maintain a constant speed using the throttle control. After modelling the longitudinal dynamics, numerical simulations were performed in MATLAB, Simulink and the obtained results confirmed a good performance of the proposed control strategy flight altitude control based on the automated speed device.