DESIGN AND TESTING OF A LOW-COST FLIGHT CONTROL AND DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM FOR UNSTABLE SUBSCALE AIRCRAFT

摘要

Current research on subscale flight testingmethodologies at Linköping University is performedby using various platforms, some of themwith advanced configurations. These have beenpreviously flown in open-loop under direct commandsfrom the pilot. However, the interest inflying some of these platforms with relaxed stabilityand the investigation of multi-surface controlallocation techniques motivated the implementationof a simple low-cost flight control systembased on commercial-off-the-shelf components.The work described in this paper evaluatesthe simplest available solutions that provide controlaugmentation for small, longitudinally unstable,free-flying models. This work also tries todefine a reliable, fail-safe system architecture thatcan be implemented in more advanced platforms.Moreover, data acquisition and analysis are evaluatedwith the aim of applying system identificationtechniques.