Positioning and Control of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

In the cdio-project course in Automatic Control, an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (uav) is constructed, utilizing an existing radio controlled model aircraft. By adding an inertial sensor measuring acceleration and rotation, together with a global positioning system (gps) sensor, the aim is to construct an accurate positioning system. This is used by an on board computer to calculate rudder control signals to a set of DC-servos in order to follow a predefined way-point trajectory. The project involves 17 students, which is roughly three times as big as previous projects, and it comprises both positioning, control, and hardware design. Since the project is still ongoing some preliminary  results and conclusions are presented.

2nd International CDIO Conference, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden, 13 – 14 June 2006