Situational awareness based flight control of a drone

Abstract

This paper focuses on a critical component of the situational awareness (SA), the control of autonomous vertical flight for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). With the SA strategy, we proposed a two stage flight control procedure to address the dynamics variation and performance requirement difference in initial and final stages of flight trajectory for a nontrivial nonlinear model of four-rotor helicopter robot called drone. This control strategy for chosen drone model has been verified by simulation of hovering maneuvers using software package Simulink and demonstrated good performance for fast stabilization of engines in hovering, consequently, fast SA with economy in energy of batteries can be asserted during the flight.