Autonomous aerobatic flight of a fixed wing unmanned aerial vehicle

[摘要] This thesis relates to the successful development of a flight control system to perform a range ofaerobatic manoeuvres autonomously. The project is the first to try to extend the flight controlcapabilities of the Computer and Control group at the University of Stellenbosch.A simplified mathematical aircraft model is developed which encapsulates the important dy-namic characteristics of the airframe. It is demonstrated how computational fluid dynamicssoftware can be used to calculate the stability and control derivatives of a conventional air-frame.A vehicle independent kinematic state estimator is presented and used to obtain the completeaircraft state vector. The estimator makes use of extended Kalman filter theory to combine aseries of low quality sensor measurements in an optimal manner. A model predictive controlstrategy is then used to regulate the aircraft about arbitrary, time variant trajectories. Thecontroller's architecture is not in any way specific to the aerobatic manoeuvres demonstrated inthis project.The avionics and ground station used for the implementation of the estimator and controlalgorithms are presented. The development of a hardware in the loop simulator is discussed andused to verify the correct implementation of the respective algorithms. Finally, practical resultsfrom two days of flight tests are presented.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University