Design and Simulation of Pitch Optimizer and Stall Protection for a Typical UAV

Abstract

Flight dynamics of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is the science of its orientation and control in three dimensions. Primary orientations include Pitch, Roll, and Yaw. The rear part of the tailplane is known as elevator control of UAV pitch. An airplane stall is an aerodynamic condition in which the airplane exceeds its given critical angle of attack and is no longer able to produce the required lift of normal flight. The main goal of this paper is to design a controller that optimizes the response speed of pitch control and design stall protection for a typical UAV. This protection system operates according to certain conditions, which are known stall conditions. When UAV reaches these conditions, the system generates a warning that UAV is at stall point and the pilot must adjust the situation to stabilize UAV. A PID controller has been implemented on MATLAB, also mathematically calculations were done to obtain suitable PID gains for a faster and accurate response of UAV elevator, after that, these mathematically PID gains have been applied to MATLAB/Simulink. Results showed the control parameters improved, such that settling time is 4.6220 seconds, the rise time is 0.2788 seconds, the percentage overshoot is 36.8192%, and steady-state error less than 2%.