DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF AUTOPILOT FOR AN AERODYNAMIC VEHICLE WITH EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

摘要

The objective of this work is to design Autopilot for an aerodynamic vehicle to implement the steering commands obtained from the guidance loop and to ensure a stable flight under the presence of environmental disturbances. A gain scheduled PID controller is synthesized for this purpose. The optimum gains of PID and PI controllers at each instants of flight are found using MATLAB SISOTOOL. MATLAB code is developed to design and analyze the controller using gain scheduling method against control objectives of gain and phase margin. The number of PID and PI gains is reduced by fine tuning. The performance of the overall control system is analyzed in the presence of environmental disturbances and it is seen that with the worst case disturbances the control objectives of stability, gain and phase margins were achieved with the maximum error of 40 meters in range.