This paper presents a novel formulation of the flight dynamic equations that permits a rapid solution for the design of trajectory following autopilots for nonlinear aircraft dynamic models. A robust autopilot control structure is developed based on the combination of the good features the Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (NDI) method, Integrator Backstepping method, Time Scale separation and Contro...

The fuzzy sliding mode control based on the multi-objective genetic algorithm is proposed to design an altitude autopilot of UAV. This case presents an interesting challenge due to the non-minimum phase characteristic, nonlinearities and uncertainties of the altitude to elevator relation. The responses of this autopilot are investigated through various criteria such as, the time response charac...

This thesis explores the use of velocity information obtained by a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver to close the aircraft’s flight control loop. A novel framework to synthesize attitude information from GPS velocity vector measurements is discussed. The framework combines the benefits of high-quality GPS velocity measurements with a novel velocity vector based flight control paradigm to...

This paper describes a recently developed architecture for a Hardware-in-the-Loop simulator for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The principal idea is to use the advanced modeling capabilities of Simulink rather than hard-coded software as the flight dynamics simulating engine. By harnessing Simulink’s ability to precisely model virtually any dynamical system or phenomena this newly developed simulato...

In this paper, an efficient strategy is proposed to design the altitude holdmode autopilot for a UAVwhich is non-minimum phase, and its model includes both parametric uncertainties and unmodeled nonlinear dynamics. This work has been motivated by the challenge of developing and implementing an autopilot that is robust with respect to these uncertainties. By combination of classic controller as ...