Design of Flight Control System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle For Urban air quality Monitoring in Uganda

Abstract

The project titled design of the flight control system of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for urban air quality monitoring in Uganda was a multi-disciplinary project under the Centre for Research in Transportation Technologies at College of Engineering Design Art and Technology of Makerere University. The project was done by three engineering disciplines that is mechanical team who designed the frame of UAV, computer team who designed the control for analysing the air quality and storing in the database and electrical team responsible for designing flight control system of UAV. The project activities started by reviewing literature of UAV dynamics and various control techniques employed for designing flight control systems of UAV such as linear control method, non-linear control method and adaptive control method, where we employed linear control method for implementation of flight control system due to its reliability and simplicity.

Flight control system design was carried out using SIMULINK in MATLAB. PID controllers were employed for optimizing roll, pitch and yaw motions of UAV. Various components for designing UAV flight control system include the transmitter, receiver, sensor module, Radio frequency module, motors and propellers, batteries and speed controllers were selected and a prototype was developed for testing the flight control system. The transmitter and receiver are programmed using C++ in Arduino and the codes were deployed on to microcontroller for testing the flight control system.

The optimised result of PID from SIMULINK simulation for flight control system gave shorter resting time for a response to a step input. The control system was then deployed on to the hard ware for testing, all components responded accurately well with the code and UAV is operating as required. The list of the selected components was submitted to CRTT management for procurement.