Previously, we have looked at the stability augmentation system. This system can be seen as the inner loop of the aircraft control system. In this chapter, we focus on the outer loop: the control augmentation system. When we want to keep a certain pitch angle, velocity, roll angle, heading, or something similar, then we use the CAS. In this way, the pilot workload can be reduced significantly. ...

Equipping a fixed wing unmanned air vehicle (UAV) with low-level autopilots, we derive high-level velocity and roll angle control laws for the UAV. Backstepping techniques are applied to design the velocity and roll angle control laws from known velocity and heading angle control laws that explicitly account for velocity and heading rate constraints of the UAV. Regarding unknown autopilot const...

The objective of this paper is to describe the design and implementation of a small semiautonomous fixed-wing unmanned air vehicle. In particular we describe the hardware and software architectures used in the design. We also describe a low weight, low cost autopilot developed at Brigham Young University and the algorithms associated with the autopilot. Novel PDA and voice interfaces to the UAV...

In this paper a full order observer has been designed using generalized matrix inverse. The design method resolves the state vector into two unique components, of which one is known and the other is unknown. This method does not assume any structure of the observer and imposes no restriction on the output distribution matrix. Condition of existence of such observer is presented with proof. An i...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is inherently an unstable system and this necessitated the need of an external controller to stabilize and to control it. In this paper presents the exploration into the simulation, design and analysis of two autopilot schemes: (1) a fuzzy-PID controller and, (2) hybrid PID-Fuzzy controller for controlling pitch plane dynamics of an aircraft. The modeled fuzzy logi...