Fractional Order Flight Control of a Small Fixed-Wing UAV: Controller Design and Simulation Study

Abstract

This paper focuses on designing and implementation of fractional order proportional integral (PIα) flight controller on a small fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). It describes mainly the controller design and simulation studies. The basics of UAV flight control are introduced first with a special emphasis on small UAV platforms. Time domain system identification methods are tried on the UAV roll channel. A new fractional order PI controller design method is then provided based on the identified first order model. The fractional order PIα controller can outperform the traditional integer order PID controller because it has a larger memory and more candidate solutions to choose. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed controller design strategy and the robustness of fractional order controller under conditions of wind gusts and various pay-loads.

Autopilots for small unmanned aerial vehicles: A survey

“…The heading and velocity controller is to guide the UAV to fly through the desired waypoints. To achieve the above control requirements, different control strategies can be used including PID, Adaptive Neural Network, Fuzzy Logic and Fractional Order Control [24], etc.…”

Design and Stabilization of a Coandӑ Effect-Based Uav: Comparative Study between Fuzzy Logic and Pid Control Approaches

“…The fine tuning of parameters and features for the flight control of an UAV is a critical task due to the non-linear aircraft characteristics [32]. Classical PID controllers have many benefits and have been used in drones with Coandȃ effect [23][24][25][26][27].…”

Autonomous Waypoint-based Guidance Methods for Small Size Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

“…The base sensor for the navigation is the GPS 4 . It provides the position, SOG 5 , bearing and many other parameters used by the navigation algorithms. The maximum position refresh rate of best GPS modules is about 5-10 Hz, which is not enough for precision flight control.…”

“…The classic PID controller has many benefits, several autopilots are using it [25,26,27,28]. The setup process of these autopilots is pretty difficult or they can be used with strong limitations, due to the non-linear aircraft characteristics [4,5].…”

“…Most of the UAV autopilots are based on a complex mathematical model using differential equations of motion. These approaches are perfect for most controller types such as classical control [1,2,3,4,5], state-space methods [6], optimal or robust control [7] and even for fuzzy control [8,9] system. The problem with those approaches are their strong model based behaviour.…”