Projeto de controladores avançados para o piloto automático do avião Cessna 172/182

Abstract

There is a growing demand for automatic control systems for unmanned aircraft due to the large number of civilian and military applications. An autopilot system in an aircraft seeks to improve the steering and pilotage mechanisms of an airplane, and is composed of complex and sophisticated controllers. This work contributes to the advancement in the development of these systems, and its general objective is to design an autopilot with advanced controllers for the Cessna 172/182 airplane. The classical control technique, which uses PID controllers, is the most used because it is efficient and easily developed, but it has limitations. Variations not foreseen in the aircraft and disturbances during the flight may not be compensated by the control system. Therefore the use of advanced control techniques is justified to improve the efficiency and reliability of the system. In this work we also propose procedures to optimize the gains of PID controllers designed from simulated transfer functions in the Matlab/Simulink software, establishing a model-in-the-loop system, and then with the integration of Matlab/Simulink and the X-Plane flight simulator, forming a software-in-the-loop system. The implementation of the designed controllers was done on an Arduino board, which was coupled to the flight simulator, constituting a hardware-in-the-loop system. In this context, results of simulations are acquired allowing to verify the effectiveness of the use of the optimization proposals made in this work. Several advanced controller options, as alternatives to the PID controller, were used, which allowed the proposed ISA-PID-EG-Fuzzy controller to be proposed. The results obtained in this work indicate that the proposed controller obtained better results in most of the comparisons made and that there are still other possibilities that should be considered in future implementations