Simulating Dynamics and Controllers for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

A brief synopsis

Drone control development encompasses fields like autonomous navigation, guidance, and control of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) through flight surfaces. As a semester long project, I was tasked with creating a digital twin which model the UAV’s rigid-body dynamics, aerodynamics, feedback control, and state estimation using sensors. Accordingly, I implemented the rigid body dynamics using Euler laws of motion for 12 DOF; aerodynamics with linear approximations of the lift (C_L) and drag (C_D) coefficients given by Beard; feedback control using standard PID, and state estimation using Kalman Filters. The project is built on a pre-existing python framework designed by Randy Beard: “Small Unmanned Aircraft: Theory and Practice” which can be found online. While the framework included a pre-built graphical interface using pyQt and pyQtgraph modules to visualize the UAV, all the flight control implementation is done from scratch.

UAV In Action