Instrumentation and control of a target fixed-wing drone for launch and capture

• Autor(a) principal: Carvalho, João Miguel Ferreira de
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/155375
• topic: UAV; PID; Backstepping; Path following; Vector field; Adaptive; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

This work was developed within the scope of the CAPTURE project, in which a collaborative network was intended to be built in which a quadcopter drone would help a fixed-wing drone perform landing and takeoff maneuvers. The study of small fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were presented, as well as their attitude control, instrumentation, and trajectory tracking. One of the goals of this dissertation was to model a real vehicle, specifically the Easy Glider 4. All the work was developed based on this vehicle, for which it was necessary to use the XFLR software to obtain its aerodynamic response and thus obtain a more accurate model and, consequently, its control. The main challenges of this dissertation were related to obtaining the full dynamic model (with the aerodynamic coefficients included), the control techniques that would be used to deal with their nonlinearities, and their integration with a path following algorithm. Two types of attitude controllers were developed: a linear controller based on PI and a nonlinear controller based on the backstepping technique. An external loop was then added to make the UAV follow a specific path. Two different techniques were implemented: a path following algorithm that would make the vehicle follow a vector field around the intended trajectory and an adaptive algorithm capable of dealing with uncertainties in the environment, such as wind with unknown direction and intensity.