Straight-line Path Following Control And Application Of Fixed-wing Unmanned Air Vehicles

In the past few decades, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has been widely researched at home and abroad. It not only has the great appli-cation prospect in military field, but also is often involved in civil and com-mercial applications at present. For some special applications of unmanned aerial vehicle especially, such as mapping, patrol monitoring, environmental monitoring, search and rescue and so on, the realization of these tasks needs to make the unmanned aerial vehicle fly following a predefined path, name-ly the path following control so called. How to converge to the given path much faster and more effectively is the main purpose of unmanned aerial vehicle path following. What’s more, with the rapid development of com-puter and microelectronics technology, the unmanned aerial vehicle has pos-sessed more advanced functions, including not only the sensors, controllers and processors on-board, but also storage and network communication abil-ities. Applying unmanned aerial vehicle into wireless sensor network has drawn much interest for the past few years. And the studies related have shown that the addition of mobile nodes to wireless sensor networks can solve the inequality problem of energy consumption existed in the network and guarantee the connectivity of the network.This thesis investigates mainly the path following control problem of unmanned aerial vehicle for a given two-dimensional straight path in fixed height, then analyses its application into linear wireless sensor networks for collecting and transmitting the data to reduce the energy consumption of sensor nodes caused by multi-hop transmission. The main research contents in this thesis consist of two parts as follows:(1) In the second chapter, we investigate the straight path following control of unmanned aerial vehicle in fixed height:With the unmanned aerial vehicle kinematics model in two-dimensional plane, an ideal course an-gle is calculated by using the method of line of sight based on the idea of vector field. Then the controller of course angle input command is de-signed according to the Lyapunov stability. At last, the simulation results prove the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method.(2) In the third chapter, we consider applying the unmanned aerial vehicle into linear wireless sensor networks:As a mobile data collector, fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle, which moves along a straight line, is used to collect the data and transfer it to the sink node in the linear wireless sensor networks. In the model considered in this thesis, sensor nodes are deployed uniformly in the linear form. In addition, two adjacent re-lay nodes don’t need to form a connected network, namely the distance between them can be greater than the communication range of the relay node. Then consider how the flying speed of the unmanned aerial vehi-cle along a straight line can affect on the data transmission delay under different intervals between two sink nodes.