Autonomous Navigation and Landing Tasks for Fixed Wing Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Autonomous control of UAVs has become a popular research topic in recent years. This paper is concerned with the flight of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and proposes fuzzy logic based autonomous flight and landing system controllers. Three fuzzy logic modules are developed under the main navigation control system and three more for the autonomous landing control system to control of the altitude, the speed, and the position against the runway, through which the global position (latitude-longitude) of the air vehicle is controlled. A SID (Standard Instrument Departure) and TACAN (Tactical Air Navigation) approach is used and the performance of the fuzzy-based controllers is evaluated with time based diagrams under MATLAB’s standard configuration and the Aerosim Aeronautical Simulation Block Set which provides a complete set of tools for rapid development of detailed 6 degree-of-freedom nonlinear generic manned/unmanned aerial vehicle models. The Aerosonde UAV model is used in the simulations in order to demonstrate the performance and the potential of the controllers. Additionally, some visual tools are deployed in order to get visual outputs that aid the designer in the evaluation of the controllers. Despite the simple design procedure, the simulated test flights indicate the capability of the approach in achieving the desired performance.