Flight Dynamics and Controls

This project was a semester long project for Dr. Tim McLain’s course on Flight Dynamics and Controls. The code is available on Github.

The project was broken into multiple parts:

Part 1: Modeling and Simulation

This section tests out control surface simulation by setting various elevator, throttle, rudder, or aileron commands. It doesn’t have trim calculated yet, so flight is unstable. It also checks the dynamics simulation of the fixed wing UAV by simply applying forces in different directions and observing the flight path.

Part 2: Heading and Altitude Control

Low level controllers are working! Data plots on the right show commanded heading and altitudes (and corresponding state trajectories) while the left simulates the flight of the UAV.

Part 3: Sensor Modeling and Fusion

This simulates the flight of the UAV now using sensor data (as opposed to true state data). The sensor data is corrupted with noise (red lines on the plots) and the states are estimated with an EKF. I added IMU, pressure, and GPS sensor models to the simulation. On the right is the sensory output and on the left are the ‘true’ state trajectories and commands.

Part 4: Path Planning and Following

This video demonstrates various types of path following capabilities (e.g. lines and orbits). We describe the longitudinal and lateral tracking problems in terms of a vector field that converges to the desired path. This video shows a path planner result through a ‘city’ of obstacles. The path planner uses Voronoi graphs or an RRT with smoothing to calculate the final displayed trajectory.