Robust Control Analysis Techniques Applied to a Mini Aircraft

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology for the development of an UAV Autopilot System, based on modeling, instrumentation and a control law, with the purpose of stabilizing the airplane attitude. Firstly, were made experimental test flights by manual control for obtaining the longitudinal model parameters using the Matlab toolbox called "System Identification Tool". The model is represented by a transfer function of the pitch angle with respect to the elevator into an open-loop system. The system is stabilized using a PD controller (derivative-proportional) tuned with poles placement method. The zero exclusion principle is used to compute the robustness margin of the closed-loop system. Different experiments were made in order to validate theoretical results which are presented at the end of this work.