Modeling and control of a new unmanned aerial vehicle (SUAVİ) with tilt-wing mechanism

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1293846 (Table of Contents)

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are flying robots that are either controlled by an operator from a remote location or flown autonomously according to the given commands. UAVs are often equipped with cameras, other sensors and communication units and used for missions which are dangerous, tedious or effortful for manned aircrafts. Some applications of these vehicles are surveillance, reconnaissance, traffic monitoring, exploration of disasters (fire, earthquake, flood, etc...) and agricultural pesticide spraying. This thesis work focuses on the modeling and control of a new quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (SUAVI: Sabanci University Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) with tilt-wing mechanism. The vehicle is capable of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) like a helicopter and flying horizontally like an airplane. The design specifications and sensor/actuator integration of SUAVI are presented. A full mathematical model that incorporates the dynamics of horizontal flight, vertical flight and the transition mode is obtained using Newton-Euler formulation. Attitude and position controllers (PID, LQR) are designed in linear framework for the VTOL mode of the vehicle. A controller for transition between vertical and horizontal flight modes is also proposed. All controllers are evaluated in simulations along with 3D visualization. For real-time experiments, Kalman filtering is employed to obtain accurate roll and pitch angle estimations. VTOL experiments with the prototype demonstrate the success of the proposed controllers.