Adaptive PID Control for Autopilot Design of Small Fixed Wing UAVs

Abstract

The development of a flight control system for the class of small fixed wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imposes a challenge to the designers to achieve acceptable and stable performance characteristics across the defined flight envelope. This paper focuses on developing a dynamic model of the Aerosonde UAV, incorporating it with an adaptive Proportional, Integral and Derivative (PID) control system for designing both lateral and longitudinal autopilots. The PID gains for each control loop are self-tuned based on an analytical approach, making sure that the desired command value is achieved at each time interval as closely as possible. To check the robust nature of the designed control system in the presence of external wind disturbance, a Dryden wind gust model was developed, and the entire simulation results were carried out in MATLAB®/Simulink environment. The proposed adaptive PID controller proves the effectiveness and robustness of the autopilot control system.