Attitude and altitude control for a fixed wing UAV applied to photogrammetry

The use of autonomous vehicles in daily life is more commonly every day, we can find it in security missions, agriculture, windmills inspection and one of its main uses the processes of photogrammetry, because the new systems and technologies to perform the last one could give errors of centimeters in a topographic map. The studies of large areas are carried out with fixed-wing UAV, so it is necessary to ensure that the vehicle could follow a desired path even in presence of external disturbances, in order to avoid uncovered or wrong defined areas during the post-processing. In this article we analyzed and compared by simulation the use of a non-linear control technique with a PID control to stabilize the airplane’s attitude and height, to prove that in some cases only a linear control technique is enough to stabilize the UAV and also probe that the amount of energy to control the UAV is similar in both techniques. So the majority of computational resources can be assigned to object detection and collision avoidance tasks, for vehicles under 5 kilograms.