Flight Tests of Autopilot Integrated with Fault-Tolerant Control of a Small Fixed-Wing UAV

Abstract EN

A fault-tolerant control scheme for the autopilot of the small fixed-wing UAV is designed and tested by the actual flight experiments.

The small fixed-wing UAV called Xiang Fei is developed independently by Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

The flight control system is designed based on an open-source autopilot (Pixhawk).

Real-time kinematic (RTK) GPS is introduced due to its high accuracy.

Some modifications on the longitudinal and lateral guidance laws are achieved to improve the flight control performance.

Moreover, a data fusion based fault-tolerant control scheme is integrated in altitude control and speed control for altitude sensor failure and airspeed sensor failure, which are the common problems for small fixed-wing UAV.

Finally, the real flight experiments are implemented to test the fault-tolerant control based autopilot of UAV.

Real flight test results are given and analyzed in detail, which show that the fixed-wing UAV can track the desired altitude and speed commands during the whole flight process including takeoff, climbing, cruising, gliding, landing, and wave-off by the fault-tolerant control based autopilot.