Design of The Flight Control System of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Urban Air Quality Monitoring in Uganda.

Abstract

This project was about the design of a flight control system of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to be used for air quality monitoring in the urban areas of Uganda. It is a project under the Center for Research in Transportation Technologies in the College of Engineering Design Art and Technology at Makerere University.

The implementation of the project began by reviewing literature about the UAV dynamics, control techniques, communication protocols available and UAV motor mixing algorithms used for designing UAV control systems.

The control system architecture for flying the UAV was designed using Simulink where all the states from the sensors were determined and fed to the controller. The designed model was simulated with Simulink blocks. The components to be used for the UAV control system were selected and the prototype was developed. The control system, transmitter and receiver prototypes were based on an Arduino nano Atmega328P microcontroller.

When the control system was deployed for testing, manual control was excellent implying ease of manoeuvrability. The UAV responded accurately and instantly to the transmitter commands which made the control of the UAV very precise thus ensuring its stability. The altitude hold feature which enables the UAV to maintain the current altitude had some drift in it because of the gyroscope module not being so accurate. However, replacement of this module with a more accurate one should fix the drift in the altitude hold feature.