A Design Of Micro UAV Balancing Instrument

Relative to manned aircraft, UAV(unmanned aerial vehicle, UAV) can complete the repeatable, low security tasks in poor conditions with low costing, high flexible, zero casualties and high battlefield survival rate. UAV, has have been widely used to military and civilian fields both at home and abroad. Comparing with the large UAV, Micro UAV has mare incomparable advantages in size, weight and cost. Micro UAV is becoming a research hotspot in recent years.The core technology of Micro UAV is the design of the matched flight control system, involving sensor technology, digital signal processing, navigation technology, automatic control and pattern recognition. At present, most of the mainstream flight control systems are designed for a specific vehicle platform with strong pertinence, poor generality, which limiting the further development of micro UAVs. Limited by the body space and its load capacity, Micro UAV has strict requirements on the size and weight of the balancing apparatus.In this paper, combing with the characteristics of micro UAV and aiming at the need for use, a universal balancing instrument is designed for multi-rotor UAV and fixed-wing UAV with the characteristics of miniaturization, low cost and flexible parameter adjustment method, which can be applied to a variety of UAV platforms. The author’s major contribution are outlined as follows:Firstly, the background and significance of the subject is introduced and then the research of micro UAV and its flight control system are summarized. The content and structure of the paper are given.Secondly, the attitude angle, the coordinate system and coordinate transformation relationship are introduced in order to satisfy the functional requirements of balancing instruments. Several common attitude determination algorithms has been compared and finally the quaternion method is selected, which is been most widely used.Thirdly, in order to meeting the demand for versatility, a PID algorithm with the two control laws is proposed in this paper as the attitude control algorithm, which includingthe angular velocity augmentation and cascade attitude augmentation. The simulation of the attitude control algorithm has been verified in X-Plane software.Fourthly, considering the hardware performance and cost, a balanced instrument embedded platform scheme is proposed in this paper. Hardware and software of ARM platform balancing instrument are designed, which offer the assistant software for PC and the phone.Fifth, in order to solving the contradiction between algorithms and computing power, an idea of co-design with hardware and software is proposed in this paper, which designs a FPGA + ARM architecture flight controller. A quickly develop solution of balancing instrument FPGA platform is also given, which do preliminary research for multi-tasking flight controller.Finally, the results of the actual flight test lasting for as long as six months show that the design of balancing instrument has good control stability. The proposed methods is suitable for multi-rotor and fixed-wing layout multiple UAVs, and with higher versatility.